The facility layout problem is concerned with determining the location of a number of facilities which optimizes a prescribed objective such as profit, cost, or distance. This problem arises in many applications; for example, in design of buildings and in plant layout design. The facility layout problem has been modeled as: a quadratic assignment problem; a quadratic set covering problem; a linear integer programming problem; a graph theoretic problem. Since this problem is NP-complete, most approaches are heuristic in nature and based on graph theoretic concepts. Graph theoretically, when the objective is to maximize profit, the facility layout problem is to determine, in a given edge weighted graph G, a maximum weight planar subgraph. In this paper, we discuss a number of heuristics for this problem. The performance of the heuristics is established through a comparative analysis based on an extensive set of random test problems.