Layout Optimization is one of the top issues for industrial facility planners in USA and around the world. It has profound effects on organizational productivity and profitability. Optimal layouts reduce materials handling costs, help streamline all operations in a facility, and reduce energy bills.  VIP-PLANOPT (Visually Interfaced Package of PLANOPT) gives you the best possible layouts for your real-world problems with its robust hybrid proprietary optimization algorithm. It is a powerful general-purpose facility layout optimization software and at the same time serves as as an excellent teaching and researh aid. The advent of this pioneering package, a decade ago, accompanied with a candid and uncontested claim: No other software produces better (lower-cost) layouts for any known set of benchmark problems . Since then, it has maintained a record of Unbeaten Performance with Unmatched Functionality.

VIP-PLANOPT can optimize with "Hard" modules that may be movable or "Anchored". "Hard" module option allows the user to specify the exact dimensions (width and length) required for ideal functioning of a department according to the user's engineering judgment.  VIP-PLANOPT produces optimized layouts maintaining exactly the user-specified dimensions while keeping ”Anchored" modules strictly at the user-specified locations. In addition, it provides the user with the flexibility of mixing the "Hard" modules with "Soft" modules that have specified area but unspecified dimensions.

It offers maximum flexibility for solving real-world problems through several unmatched capabilities e.g. module-padding, module-flipping, pick-up & drop-off points, composite shape boundary, upper bounds on inter-department distances, forbidden-area modeling, etc.

With ongoing research and new ideas, VIP-PLANOPT is continually advancing on its superiority for Industrial Applications. At the same time, for the educational institutions, it has established itself as an excellent and affordable Teaching & Research aid.