SIMULATED ANNEALING APPROACH TO SOLVE A CELLULAR MANUFACTURING SYSTEM USING MDMTSP

Design of cellular manufacturing systems involves many structural and operational issues. One of important design steps is the formation of part families and machine cells (cell formation). Despite a large number of papers on cell formation being published, only a handful incorporates operation sequence in layout design (intra-cell move calculations). We propose a solution that will solve the part-family and machine cell formation problem by simultaneously considering the within-cell layout problem. In this paper, the cellular manufacturing system is formulated as a multiple departures single destination multiple travelling salesman problem (MDmTSP) and a solution methodology based on simulated annealing is proposed. The approach is illustrated by three examples and a comparison has been done with CASE (Nair and Narendran 1998), genetic algorithm (Boulif and Atif 2006) and CLASS (Mahdavi et al. 2008).