“…Authors indicated that the QAP can be used for layout optimization (Burkard, Çela, Pardalos, & Pitsoulis, 1998; Loiola, Abreu, & Boaventura-Netto, 2004). Many provided solutions for QAP through heuristics (Elshafei, 1977; Helber, Böhme, Oucherif, Lagershausen, & Kasper, 2016; Silva, Resende, Pardalos, Mateus, & De Tomi, 2013; Yeh, 2006) and linear, nonlinear, or mixed optimizations (Chraibi, Kharraja, Osman, & Elbeqqali, 2015; Feng & Su, 2015; Hahn & Krarup, 2001; Murtagh, Jefferson, & Sornprasit, 1982; Nickel, 2000). Other modeling approaches were used by authors such as Chraibi, Kharraja, Osman, and Elbeqqali (2016) and Abbasi, Ahmadi, Naderi, and Vahdami (2017) for layout planning.…”