A MULTI STAGE HEURISTIC FOR MANUFACTURING CELL FORMATION

Cellular manufacturing (CM) is a modern manufacturing concept based on the Group technology (GT) philosophy. CM enables a manufacturing unit to enhance its productivity substantially through improved utilization of resources. In Cellular manufacturing system design process the task of solving cell formation problem (machine –component grouping) is the central issue. Cell formation problem is considered as complex one due to its combinatorial nature. Research interest is growing towards development of novel solution methodologies for the purpose of cell formation. Even though numerous approaches have been implemented by researchers for the task of machine-component grouping, the effectiveness of multi stage solution procedures based on the integration of traditional and non-traditional optimization techniques needs to be investigated adequately. This paper demonstrates the development and implementation of a multi stage heuristic based on the integration of traditional cluster analysis technique and non- traditional simulated annealing technique for standard cell formation. The proposed heuristic is tested using a number of binary and non-binary datasets and computational results are presented. Results indicate that proposed heuristic is capable of generating promising quality solutions when compared with a few alternate cell forming approaches