The layout of chemical facilities is an activity that is largely carri
ed out by the human designer. Few methods exist for optimising layout.
Difficulties in formulating the problem as a mathematical program ste
m from non-convexities as well as from non-differentiable cast functio
ns. Recent attempts (Penteado and Chic, 1996) have succeeded in only i
mplicitly including land costs, resulting in layouts which can be exce
ssively conservative from the point of view of safety. The use of stoc
hastic optimisation techniques, though not guaranteed to find the glob
al optimum, has proved to be effective in obtaining good, practical so
lutions and permits the incorporation of more realistic cost functions
and constraints. In this research, experiments were carried out using
various genetic algorithm formulations, and the resulting program, wh
ich includes a useful graphical interactive component, is presented he
re. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.