The handling distance was measured by the sum of the products of flow volume and rectilinear distance between the centroids of two departments. The adjacency score is the sum of all positive relationships between adjacent departments. There is a positive relationship between each two consecutive departments along the process routing. Shape ratio is defined as the maximum of the depth-towidth and width-to-depth ratio of the smallest rectangle that completely encloses the department. The shape ratio is always greater or equal to one. For a layout design problem, we endeavour to minimize both the shape ratio and flow distance, while maximizing adjacency score.