An Exact Multiobjective Epsilon-Constraint Approach for the Manufacturing Cell Formation Problem

Cell formation is one of the main problems to be solved when dealing with cellular manufacturing. An exact graph theory based Branch & Bound method has been proposed by the authors [Boulif, M et al., (2006)]. In this paper we tackle the problem by considering two objectives: minimizing both intercellular movements and workload unbalance. We argue that when an epsilon-constraint approach is adopted, an enhancement of the lower bound of the B&B branching step can be obtained. This improvement gives a worthwhile help to the method efficiency when seeking to solve the problem optimally