Joint cell formation, cell scheduling, and group layout problem in virtual and classical cellular manufacturing systems

Abstract

Cell formation, cell scheduling, and group layout are three important problems in designing and configuring a Cellular Manufacturing System (CMS). This paper addresses the integration of these problems in virtual and classical CMSs considering alternative processing routes. The objective is to minimize the total handling costs and cycle time. Due to the computational complexity of the problem, hybrid metaheuristic algorithms are proposed to solve the problem. Depending on the type of cells, which is either classical or virtual, an encoding scheme is proposed to effectively represent candidate solutions. Placement algorithms are developed to obtain the layout from an encoded solution; these algorithms are either based on running a heuristic or a linear program. A computer software, called ICFLSD (Integrated Cell Formation, Layout, and Scheduling Designer) is developed to simplify the problem-solving process from the data entry to getting results. Numerical examples adopted from the literature are solved using the ICFLSD and CPLEX to assess the performance of the metaheuristic algorithms. The comparison results demonstrated the superiority of the simulated annealing to the other solution approaches considered in this study.