Facility layout problem is one of the truly difficult combinatorial optimization problems
that remain unsolved. The task is to assign facilities to locations in a manner so as to
minimize a total cost function. In this paper, we propose a new global optimization technique,
which makes combined use of evolutionary programming and simulating annealing.
Experimental results for the standard benchmark problems are reported and the results show
that our proposed algorithm compares favorably with other heuristic algorithms.