Title: A Tabu Search strategy to solve cell formation problem with ratio level data

Authors: R. Kamalakannan; R. Sudhakara Pandian

Addresses: Department of Mechanical Engineering, Vickram College of Engineering, Madurai, Tamil Nadu-630 561, India ' Department of Mechanical Engineering, SACS MAVMM Engineering College, Madurai Tamil Nadu-625 301, India

Abstract: This paper concentrates on the cell formation problem for the ratio level data to the design of cellular manufacturing system. The aim of this paper is to identify the machine cells and part family and as a result to create production cells in order to reduce the cell load variation. A competent Tabu Search (TS) algorithm is proposed to investigate the search space of all possible solutions with a chain of moves. This method is an iterative process for seeking a global optimum for the discrete combinatorial optimisation problems. The ratio level data is calculated in terms of time in seconds based on the data collected from the processing time of the part, production volume of the part and availability of the machine. A modified grouping efficiency (MGE) is used to compute the cell formation problem. The results clearly indicated that this proposed TS yield good results compared to the chosen benchmark problems.

Keywords: Tabu Search algorithm; cell formation problem; ratio level data; modified grouping efficiency; MGE.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBIDM.2018.088431

International Journal of Business Intelligence and Data Mining, 2018 Vol.13 No.1/2/3, pp.209 - 220

Received: 05 Oct 2016
Accepted: 22 Jan 2017
Published online: 07 Dec 2017 *

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