An efficient approach to determine cell formation,cell layout and intracellular machine sequence in cellular manufacturing systems

Cellular manufacturing systems (CMS) are used to improve production flexibility and efficiency. They involve the identification of part families and machine cells so that intercellular movement is minimized and the utilization of the machines within a cell is maximized. Previous research has focused mainly on cell formation problems and their variants; however, only few articles have focused on more practical and complicated problems that simultaneously consider the three critical issues in the CMS-design process, i.e., cell formation, cell layout, and intracellular machine sequence. In this study, a two-stage mathematical programming model is formulated to integrate the three critical issues with the consideration of alternative process routings, operation sequences, and production volume. Next, because of the combinatorial nature of the above model, an efficient tabu search algorithm based on a generalized similarity coefficient is proposed. Computational results from test problems show that our proposed model and solution approach are both effective and efficient. When compared to the mathematical programming approach, which takes more than 112 h (LINGO) and 1139 s (CPLEX) to solve a set of ten test instances, the proposed algorithm can produce optimal solutions for the same set of test instances in less than 12 s.