A NEW APPROACH TO THE BLOCK LAYOUT PROBLEM

The main problem concerned with applying graph theory to facilities la yout is the conversion of the dual graph to a block layout. This paper presents a new method of producing a planar orthogonal layout or floo rplan of a set of facilities subject to adjacency and area constraints . It improves upon previous approaches by accepting any maximal planar graph representing the adjacencies as input. Simple selection criteri a for choosing the next facility to be inserted into the floorplan are used. Further, any sensible orthogonal shape for the facilities in th e resulting floorplan can be generated.