Part-machine cell formation in group technology using a simulated annealing-based meta-heuristic

Abstract

The part-machine cell formation problem (PMCFP) is a crucial step in the design of a cellular manufacturing system and has received considerable research attention over the last five decades. This study proposes a simulated annealing-based meta-heuristic for solving the PMCFP. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is compared to conventional algorithms across a set of PMCFPs available in the literature. Computational results using four types of performance measures show that the proposed simulated annealing-based meta-heuristic is highly effective by comparison with conventional algorithms for PMCFPs on the same test problems.