Brains trust required - office space planning

[dimplexhash]

Hi,

I am a long time lurker first time poster. A friend of mine recently came to me with a problem that I've been racking my brain on but can't yet solve. He is a manager in a company with approximately 1200 staff spread across 2 buildings. The staff perform a number of functions and are broken into approximately 30 teams. Each of the teams has a requirement to sit near certain other teams, be near certain building features in some cases (e.g. disabled facilities), and have space allocation for future growth.

The challenge my friend is experiencing is that the company is looking to take on a lot more people quite quickly in the next few months, some of which will be short term, some long term and he needs to ensure that:

* People can sit together where required
* The number of desk moves are limited
* Everyone has a desk

At present he is undertaking the work manually using Excel spreadsheets of the building plans, and manual checklists to do scenario planning, which is an immense amount of work and not at all efficient.

I have looked on Google on his behalf trying to find a technology tool that would make this process much simpler (and I believe that something simply HAS to exist out there!!) but to date have not been successful.

What application can be used to:

* Enter a rough floorplan
* Enter constraints (e.g. 100 people must sit near this team, 10 other from another team can be in another building), enter the roll-on and
roll-off dates, and basically all the other parameters in order to come out with the cleanest, simplest solution with the minimal number of moves required
* Some parameters would be preferences / priorities - e.g. it may be 'important' for one team to sit near another, but not 'mandatory'. A mandatory requirement would need to be calculated as taking precedence over an 'important' or 'nice to have'.

This has to be a common problem the world over, so hoping the collective intelligence of this group can help out.

Thanks!