An ant colony algorithm for cell-formation in cellular manufacturing systems
by N. Megala, Chandrasekharan Rajendran, Ram Gopalan
European J. of Industrial Engineering (EJIE), Vol. 2, No. 3, 2008

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]

Online publication date: Wed, 26-Mar-2008

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