Title: An ant colony algorithm for cell-formation in cellular manufacturing systems

Authors: N. Megala, Chandrasekharan Rajendran, Ram Gopalan

Addresses: Department of Management Studies, IIT Madras, Chennai 600 036, India. ' Department of Management Studies, IIT Madras, Chennai 600 036, India. ' Department of Marketing, Fox School of Business, Temple University, 1810, N.13th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19122, USA

Abstract: In this paper, we consider the problem of cell-formation in cellular manufacturing systems with the objective of maximising the grouping efficacy. We propose an Ant-Colony Optimisation (ACO) algorithm to obtain machine-cells and part-families. The Proposed ACO (PACO) algorithm is tested by using many benchmark data sets. The grouping efficacy obtained by the PACO algorithm for a given benchmark problem instance is compared with the grouping efficacies obtained by the existing approaches. The comparison shows that the PACO performs very well in maximising the grouping efficacy. [Received: 2 May 2007; Revised: 1 November 2007; Accepted: 3 December 2007]

Keywords: cellular manufacturing systems; CMS; cell formation; ant colony optimisation; ACO algorithm; manufacturing cells; grouping efficacy; machine cells; part families.

DOI: 10.1504/EJIE.2008.017688

European Journal of Industrial Engineering, 2008 Vol.2 No.3, pp.298 - 336

Published online: 26 Mar 2008 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article