An ant approach to define product families and remanufacturing cells

Abstract

Cellular manufacturing has the potential to reduce the complexity of a manufacturing system, decoupling a complex factory in mini-factories or cells. This concept has an immense potential to be implemented in remanufacturing, which is a promising circular economy strategy which allows to recover the value added to used products. A remanufacturing system is complex, and this creates a barrier to its implementation. This study introduces an ant-based algorithm which addresses the formation of product/part families and remanufacturing cells. A novel approach used in this study mimics ant behaviour by using an artificial pheromone that reinforces similarities between machines and parts, allowing the definition of cells and families with superior performance over Genetic Algorithms (GA) and Bacterial Foraging Optimization Algorithm (BFOA) in the solution of benchmark problems.