A decomposition approach to the cell formation problem with alternative process plans

Abstract

This paper considers the cell formation problem in which alternative process plans exist for each part. A three-stage algorithm decomposing the original problem into three subproblems, i.e., process plan selection, parts assignment, and machines assignment problems, respectively, is proposed to solve this problem. Test problems, both from the literature and those generated in this study, are used to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm. The proposed algorithm can very efficiently find good-quality solutions and should thus be useful to practitioners and researchers.