The task of positioning temporary facilities on a construction site has long been recognized as a factor of great influence on the cost of projects. This paper proposes the use of a recently developed harmony search (HS) algorithm to solve the problem of assigning a set of predetermined facilities to a set of preallocated locations within a construction site. Experiments with different parameter settings were conducted, and an alternative approach was used with a modified HS algorithm to overcome shortcomings of the original method. The proposed algorithm shows a rapid convergence to an optimum solution during the early stages of algorithm progress. In addition, comparisons with different variations of the HS algorithm and genetic algorithm (GA) are presented to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method and HS methodology in solving facility layout problems.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.