Improving the Grenade Explosion Method in Solving the Dynamic Cell Formation Problem

  Cell formation is the first and most important problem in designing cellular manufacturing systems. We have modeled the dynamic cell formation problem with respect to the minimization of the intercellular movement and cellular reconfiguration costs. Due to the nonpolynomiality of the cell formation models, a newly introduced metaheuristic namely the grenade explosion method (GEM) is applied to solve the proposed model. We have introduced some modifications to improve the performance of the standard GEM which are modifying the location of the grenade explosion in each step, modifying the correction process of the infeasible solutions and introducing free grenade as a new component of the GEM. The proposed modified GEM is compared to the standard GEM and a simulated annealing algorithm through some numerical examples. The computational results illustrate the preference of the GEM algorithms over the simulated annealing algorithm. Furthermore, the results obtained using the modified GEM are superior to those ones achieved using the standard GEM .