Title: Cell formation and layout design with alternative routing: a multi-objective scatter search approach

Authors: M. Saeed Jabal-Ameli; Mohammad Moshref-Javadi; Behzad Bankian Tabrizi; Milad Mohammadi

Addresses: Department of Industrial Engineering, Iran University of Science and Technology, Narmak, Tehran 16846, Iran ' Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Auburn University, Auburn, AL 36849, USA ' Department of Industrial Engineering, Iran University of Science and Technology, Narmak, Tehran 16846, Iran ' Department of Industrial Engineering, Iran University of Science and Technology, Narmak, Tehran 16846, Iran

Abstract: Cellular manufacturing is a technology to improve the productivity and flexibility of manufacturing systems. Cell formation and layout design are two main problems in designing cellular manufacturing systems (CMSs). Due to the interaction between the two problems, these problems must be solved simultaneously to obtain the optimal solution. The problem is formulated as three different mathematical models which differ with respect to layout constraints and backward movements. A multi-objective scatter search is proposed to solve the integrated cell formation and layout design problem in CMSs. We introduce a new solution representation which is used in the algorithm. The performance of the algorithm is compared with the epsilon-constraint method and a well-known multi-objective evolutionary algorithm, non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm II (NSGA-II). The proposed algorithm not only obtained better solutions in comparison to the solutions proposed by past authors, but also it performs better than NSGA-II.

Keywords: cell formation; layout design; multi-objective programming; scatter search; NSGA-II; genetic algorithms; utilisation; CMS; cellular manufacturing systems; backward movements; inter-cell layout; intra-cell layout; variable process routing; alternative routing; manufacturing cells; cell design.

DOI: 10.1504/IJISE.2013.054281

International Journal of Industrial and Systems Engineering, 2013 Vol.14 No.3, pp.269 - 295

Published online: 27 Dec 2013 *

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