Title: Multi-objective cell formation with routing flexibility: a graph partitioning approach

Authors: Menouar Boulif; Karim Atif

Addresses: Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Sciences, M'Hamed Bouguerra University of Boumerdès, 35000 Boumerdès, Algeria ' Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Sciences and Technology Houari Boumediene, BP 32. El-Alia, 16111 Babezzouar, Algiers, Algeria

Abstract: This paper deals with the manufacturing cell formation (MCF) problem using a multi-objective graph-theoretic approach. In cellular manufacturing related recent works, several research paths have been taken such as the multi-periodic and the routing flexibility approaches. Our paper falls into the latter by proposing a multi-objective approach. First, the problem is formulated using a graph theoretic model, afterwards two resolution methods are proposed: the first one is a genetic algorithm (GA) whereas the second uses a combination between GA and tabu search. The two methods are applied on a set of medium-sized instances and the obtained results are reported.

Keywords: cellular manufacturing systems; CMS; routing flexibility; graph partitioning; multi-objective optimisation; genetic algorithms; tabu search; cell formation; manufacturing cells; graph theory.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCSE.2015.071881

International Journal of Computational Science and Engineering, 2015 Vol.11 No.2, pp.186 - 206

Received: 24 Jul 2012
Accepted: 22 Dec 2012
Published online: 22 Sep 2015 *

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