An Efficient Algorithm to Solve Utilization-based Model for Cellular Manufacturing Systems

The design of cellular manufacturing system (CMS) involves many structural and operational issues. One of the important CMS design steps is the formation of part families and machine cells which is called cell formation. In this paper, we propose an efficient algorithm to solve a new mathematical model for cell formation in cellular manufacturing systems based on cell utilization concept. The proposed model is to minimize the number of voids in cells to achieve higher cell utilization. The proposed model is a non-linear model which cannot be optimally solved. Thus, a linearization approach is used and the linearized model is then solved by linear optimization software. Even after linearization, the large-sized problems are still difficult to solve, therefore, a Simulated Annealing method is developed. To verify the quality and efficiency of the SA algorithm, a number of test problems with different sizes are solved and the results are compared with solutions obtained by Lingo 8 in terms of objective function values and computational time.