F FACILITIES LAYOUT PROBLEMS, FLP Facilities layout (FL) is concerned with the placement, relative to one another, of the facilities of some physical system. This area differs from planar multifacilities location (MFL; cf. also Multifacility and r e s t r i c t e d location problems) in that in FL the facilities are all assumed to have a significant physical area and are to be placed in a finite total area which represents their physical system. In MFL the facilities are assumed to be dimensionless points.The aim of FL is to produce a scale plan (in some scenarios called a block plan) of the physical system to be designed. The plan depicts the facilities of the system (each one having its given area and shape) laid out relative to each other. An example of a simple block plan is shown in Fig. 1.