The design of a cellular manufacturing system requires that a part population, at least minimally described by its use of process technology (part/machine incidence matrix), be partitioned into part families and that the associated plant equipment be partitioned into machine cells. At the highest level, the objective is to form a set of completely autonomous units such that inter-cell movement of parts is minimized. We present an integer program that is solved using a genetic algorithm (GA) to assist in the design of cellular manufacturing systems. The formulation uses a unique representation scheme for individuals (part/machine partitions) that reduces the size of the cell formation problem and increases the scale of problems that can be solved. This approach offers improved design flexibility by allowing a variety of evaluation functions to be employed and by incorporating design constraints during cell formation. The effectiveness of the GA approach is demonstrated on several problems from the literature.

This paper presents a new evolutionary approach to the machine-part cell formation (MPCF) problem, generally considered in manufacturing cell design, where a zero-one machine-part matrix must have its rows and columns moved to form machines and parts clusters. The Constructive Genetic Algorithm (CGA) was proposed recently to solve clustering problems, and is applied here to the MPCF. The MPCF is modeled as a bi-objective problem that guides the construction of feasible assignments of machines and parts to specify clusters, and provides evaluation of schemata and structures in a common basis. A particularly derived structure and schema representation considers Jaccard distances for binary strings. A variable size population is formed only by schemata, considered as building blocks for feasible solutions construction along the generations. Recombination gives population diversification, and local search mutation is applied to structures that represent feasible solutions. Experimental res...

heuristic to minimize makespan of cell scheduling problem

Cellular manufacturing emerged as a production strategy capable of solving the problems of complexity and long manufacturing lead times in batch production. The fundamental problem in cellular manufacturing is the formation of product families and machine cells. This paper presents a new approach for obtaining machine cells and product families. The approach combines a local search heuristic with a genetic algorithm. Computational experience with the algorithm on a set of group technology problems available in the literature is also presented. The approach produced solutions with a grouping efficacy that is at least as good as any results previously reported in literature and improved the grouping efficacy for 59 % of the problems. Keywords: Cellular Manufacturing; Group Technology; Genetic Algorithms; Random Keys AT&T Labs Research Technical Report TD-5FE6RN, October 29, 2002.