A GENETIC ALGORITHM APPROACH FOR MACHINE CELL FORMATION

Abstract

Cellular Manufacturing Systems (CMS) have been the key to the success of manufacturing industries in the recent past. Machine cell design, which involves formation of machine cells and component groups, represents the most important step in the design of CMS. Even though a tremendous amount of research has been conducted in this area, the gap between theoretical research and practice is widening primarily because of the lack of consideration of key production data such as production volumes, operations sequences, machine sequence inside the cells, processing times, setup times, and machine costs during the cell design stage. This paper discuses the development of a Genetic Algorithm Model (GAM), designed to assist in the formation of manufacturing cells. The GAM aims at the minimization of the material handling and the penalty costs while considering the effects of inter-cell, intra-cell, backtracking, and machine skipping movements.