Evolving Design Genes in Space Layout Planning Problems

The space layout planning problem is one of the most difficult in architectural design. It is practically important in architectural design because it is the basis of the development of most designs. It is important in a wider context because it maps onto a large class of location-allocation problems including VLSI floorplanning, process layouts and facilities layout problems. We will use the formalization of the space layout problem as a particular case of a combinatorial optimization problem - a quadratic assignment problem [9]. As such it is NP-complete and presents all the difficulties associated with this class of problems. Over the years a number of approximate algorithms based on combinations of global and local search techniques and heuristics have been developed specifically for this class of problems. Although they are reasonably efficient for small-scale problems, the computational cost is still too high for large-scale problems. Another shortcoming of t..