AN EFFICIENT ALGORITHM TO INTER AND INTRA-CELL LAYOUT PROBLEMS IN CELLULAR MANUFACTURING SYSTEMS WITH STOCHASTIC DEMANDS.

In the design of a cellular manufacturing system (CMS), one of the important problems is the CMS layout. This paper presents a new mathematical model concerning inter-cell and intra-cell cost in layout problems in cellular manufacturing systems with stochastic demands. The objective of the model is to minimize the total cost incurred by the inter-cell and intra-cell movements. The proposed model determines the location of each machine in each cell and the location of cells on the shop floor with respect to the confidence level determined by the decision maker. The proposed model is a non-linear model which cannot be easily optimally solved. Thus, a linearization approach is used and the linearized model is then solved by a linear optimization software. Even after linearization, the large-sized problems are still difficult to solve, there fore a Simulated Annealing (SA) 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.