A revised imperialist competition algorithm for cellular manufacturing optimization based on product line design

Abstract

<p style='text-indent:20px;'>Due to the fierce market competition, enterprises try to satisfy customers' requirements for personalized products in order to maximize profit or market share of their products. This not only needs to determine the product variants through product line design, but also needs to pay attention to resource allocation in the manufacturing process. This paper proposes a cellular manufacturing optimization model that considers the market and production. If the company excessively pursues the satisfaction of customers' personalized needs, the manufacturing time and cost may increase accordingly. Of course, with the restriction of production capacity in manufacturing cells and the expectation of reducing cost, managers cannot design attributes' levels of a product line casually, which may result in its unstable marketing share and profit. Therefore, the product demand influenced by customers' preferences could be a key factor to link market and production. The objective of propose model is to maximize product profit which consists of revenue and miscellaneous costs (material, processing, transportation, final assembly and fixed costs). A revised imperialist competitive algorithm (RICA) is developed to optimize the discrete problem. Extensive numerical experiments and t-test are carried out to verify the effect of this method. The results demonstrate the proficiency of RICA over another imperialist competitive algorithm based method and genetic algorithm in terms of solution quality.</p>