Hospital department layout problems (HDLPs) are significant in enhancing service quality and reducing patients' travel distance and time. Their studies are scarce in comparison with those for facility layout problems in manufacturing systems. Existing approaches to HDLPs usually adopt simplified models and thus gain very limited applications in a real world. HDLPs typically involve multiple objectives that may conflict with each other. There have been no studies on their multiobjective heuristic approaches to our best knowledge. In this paper, we propose multiobjective tabu search (MTS) for a real-world HDLP. Beside the frequently used objective of flow cost, ensuring the closeness among certain departments is introduced as another one. A solution coding scheme is designed to represent a solution. A penalty function is devised to handle infeasible solutions. Local search is integrated into tabu search to optimize the assignment of departments. Experiment results show that MTS is able to produce Pareto solutions that outperform those of the comparative method. Compared to the actually implemented layout, solutions produced by MTS can save about 5%-15% patients' travel time (distance).

Service‐oriented architecture is becoming a major software framework for complex application and it can be dynamically and flexibly composed by integrating existing component web services provided by different providers with standard protocols. The rapid introduction of new web services into a dynamic business environment can adversely affect the service quality and user satisfaction. Therefore, how to leverage, aggregate and make use of individual component's quality of service (QoS) information to derive the optimal QoS of the composite service which meets the needs of users is still an ongoing hot research problem. This study aims at reviewing the advance of the current state‐of‐the‐art in technologies and inspiring the possible new ideas for web service selection and composition, especially with nature‐inspired computing approaches. Firstly, the background knowledge of web services is presented. Secondly, various nature‐inspired web selection and composition approaches are systematically reviewed and analysed for QoS‐aware web services. Finally, challenges, remarks and discussions about QoS‐aware web service composition are presented.