Abstract

An Ant Colony Optimization Approach for the Machine-Part Cell Formation Problem

Highlights

  • Cellular manufacturing (CM) as an application of group technology is concerned with the formation and operation of manufacturing cells in which a set of part families are processed using machine cells

  • One of the most important problems encountered in designing CM system is cell formation (CF), which deals with identifying machine cells and part families.[1]

  • The trade-off between intensification and diversification is the key point to achieve good results in different runs of a search algorithm.[43]. This trade-off is obtained by using a well-defined heuristic information and an effective local search algorithm to reinforce the intensification of the algorithm as well as defining upper and lower limits for the pheromone values and using a strategy in the local pheromone update to increase the diversification of the algorithm

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Summary

Introduction

Cellular manufacturing (CM) as an application of group technology is concerned with the formation and operation of manufacturing cells in which a set of part families are processed using machine cells. Many solution methods have been developed to solve the machine-part cell formation (MPCF) problem in which a given machine-part incidence matrix is modified to obtain machine cells and part families with the objective of minimizing inter-cellular movements and maximizing machines’ utilization. Oliveira et al have presented[17] a bipartite graph modeling with a graph clustering algorithm for determining machine cells and part families in the CM systems. Combined[30] grouping GA with the local search heuristic proposed by Goncalves and Resende[24] to determine part families and machine cells. Hung et al have proposed[37] a novel procedure based on a fuzzy relational data clustering algorithm for solving the manufacturing cells design problem. An ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm is presented to solve the MPCF problem.

Machine-part cell formation problem
The proposed ACO algorithm
Solution Construction
Local pheromone update
Determining part-families
Determining machine-cells
Local Search
Global pheromone update
Computational experiments
35 Chandrasekharan and Rajagopalan11
Conclusion

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