Discrete cuckoo search algorithm for solving the cell formation problem

Abstract

The manufacturing cell formation problem is considered one of the first issues in the designing of cellular manufacturing systems, that attempts to construct a set of machine cells and their corresponding product families. The aim is to minimise the inter-cell movements of the products while maximising the machine utilisation. Recently developed cuckoo search algorithm is introduced in this paper to solve this kind of problems which is discrete in nature. The proposed method is combined with a local search mechanism in order to intensify the search and improve the quality of the solutions. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, a set of 35 benchmark problems is used; the results are then compared to different methods collected from the literature. The results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is a very effective and performs well on all test problems since it can reach 32 out of 35 benchmark problems (91.43%). [Submitted 21 June 2017; Accepted 3 May 2018]