Abstract Recent and emerging trends in the facility layout problem, covering the last 10 years of research, are presented, including new methodologies, objectives, algorithms, and extensions to this well-studied combinatorial optimization problem. The state of the art in facility layout software is compared to the state of the art in facility layout research. New developments in emerging layout research provide a perspective on what the future of the field will be like. A trend toward concurrent engineering approaches to layout and production system design is observed.