Two-Stage Inter-Cell Layout Design for Cellular Manufacturing by Using Ant Colony Optimization Algorithms

Facility layout planning plays an important role in the manufacturing process and seriously impacts a company's profitability A well-planned layout can significantly reduce the total material handling cost The purpose of this paper is to develop a two-stage inter-cell layout optimization approach by using one of the popular meta-heuristics the Ant Colony Optimization algorithm the first stage. the cells are formed based on the part-machine clustering Jesuits obtained through the ant system algorithm In other words. we get the initial inter-cell layout after this stage The work at the second stage uses a hybrid ant system algorithm to improve the solution obtained at previous stage Different performance measures are also employed in this paper to evaluate the results.