A Practical Methodology for Reproducible Experimentation: An Application to the Double-Row Facility Layout Problem

Abstract

Reproducibility of experiments is a complex task in stochastic methods such as evolu- tionary algorithms or metaheuristics in general. Many works from the literature give general guidelines to favor reproducibility. However, none of them provide both a practical set of steps and also software tools to help on this process. In this paper, we propose a practical methodology to favor reproducibility in optimization prob- lems tackled with stochastic methods. This methodology is divided into three main steps, where the researcher is assisted by software tools which implement state-of-the- art techniques related to this process. The methodology has been applied to study the Double Row Facility Layout Problem, where we propose a new algorithm able to obtain better results than the state-of-the-art methods. To this aim, we have also repli- cated the previous methods in order to complete the study with a new set of larger instances. All the produced artifacts related to the methodology and the study of the target problem are available in Zenodo.