This chapter illustrates the cell formation problem (CFP) supported by similarity based methods. In particular, problem oriented indices are based on several factors which play an important role in the determination of the value of similarity between two generic machines, e.g. the number of machines visited by each part, the sequence of manufacturing operations, the production quantity for each...

This paper addresses the cell formation problem with alternative process plans and machine capacity constraints. The problem of Generalized Cell Formation consists in defining the preferential process and the preferential routing for each part optimizing the grouping of machines into independent manufacturing cells. The problem is reduced in two grouping problems: grouping operations (including...

In this paper, we develop a new mathematical model for a cyclic multiple-part type threemachine robotic cell problem. In this robotic cell a robot is used for material handling. The objective is finding a part sequence to minimize the cycle time (i.e.; maximize the throughput) with assumption of known robot movement. The developed model is based on Petri nets and provides a new method to calcul...

In spite of many researches in literature investigating dynamic of cell formation (CF) problem, further research needs to be elaborated to assay hidden aspects of cellular manufacturing system (CMS), due to inherent complexity and uncertainty on optimizing this problem. In this paper, sensitivity analysis of modified self-adaptive differential evolution (MSDE) algorithm is proposed for basic pa...

A linear binary programming formulation is introduced to generate a solution for the cell formation problem using CPLEX. Numerical experimentation is completed with 35 benchmark problems to evaluate the quality of the solution generated with heuristic methods proposed in the literature. This experimentation indicates that for the smaller problems, the best-known solutions are the same as those ...