Application of Soft-Computing Methods in Cellular Manufacturing

Abstract

The essential problem in Cellular Manufacturing System (CMS) is to identify the machine cells and subsequent part families with an aim to curtail the intercell and intracell traffic, known as Cell Formation Problem (CFP). This chapter portrays the need of soft-computing methods to model the CFP to attain enhanced solutions. The novelty of this chapter is in developing a hybrid state-of-the-art metaheuristic approach, namely SAHCF (Simulated Annealing Heuristic to Cell Formation), to solve the binary CFP, and further, a Fuzzy-ART based hybrid technique is framed to solve the generalized CFP using operational time. The proposed techniques are tested on the test datasets published in the past literature. Both the techniques are shown to outperform the published methods available in literature and attained enhanced results by exceeding the solution quality on the test problems. The originality of this study lies in designing simple and efficient methodologies to produce near optimal solutions for the shop-floor managers with minimum computing abilities and time.