Cellular manufacturing systems design using Tabu search

Abstract

Several techniques have appeared in the literature for the cell formation problem. However, most of these heuristics have the disadvantages that they cannot solve real-life problems typical of manufacturing firms in reasonable computational time, and deal with the part family formation and cell grouping problems separately. The Tabu search meta-heuristic is presented for resolving these problems. The minimization of intercellular movements as an objective function is demonstrated, although minimization of cell load variation and the multiobjective function option exist in the procedure developed. The results discussed for some problems taken from the literature show that the Tabu search is a promising technique for solving the cellular manufacturing systems design problem for both medium and large problem instances.