A Simulated Annealing for Solving a Group Layout Design Model of a Dynamic Cellular Manufacturing System

This paper presents a novel mixed-integer non-linear programming model for the layout design of a dynamic cellular manufacturing system (DCMS). A novel aspect of this model is concurrently making the cell formation (CF) and group layout (GL) decisions in a dynamic environment. The proposed model incorporates several design features including alternate process routings, operation sequence, processing time, production volume of parts, purchasing machine, duplicate machines, machine capacity, lot splitting, intra-cell layout, inter-cell layout, multi-rows layout of equal area facilities, and flexible reconfiguration. An efficient simulated annealing (SA) algorithm is extended to solve the proposed model because of its NP-hardness. It is then tested using several problems with different sizes and settings to verify the computational efficiency of the developed algorithm in comparison with the Lingo software. The obtained results show that the proposed SA is able to find the near-optimal solutions in a reasonable computational time.