Abstract
We consider the single facility layout problem with the Manhattan metric. The existing departments are considered as barriers to travel and the new department which is aggregated to an infinitesimal point, is located on the plane. We discuss how to draw the contour lines in the case of barriers to travel. We relax the aggregation assumption for the new department and locate it on the available area based on the results of the aggregated problem. We also analyze the two aspects of our assumption to aggregate the new department to a single point. We comment on the possible cost estimation errors as a result of the techniques proposed.