A memetic algorithm approach to the cell formation problem

In the past three decades many studies have been carried out on cellular manufacturing. The main problem in the development of cellular manufacturing is that of machine cell formation. In this paper a new metaheuristic called a memetic algorithm (MA) is introduced to solve the machine cell formation problem in group technology. The objective functions considered in this work are (a) minimization of total number of moves and (b) minimization of cell load variation and the constraints considered are minimum number of machines in each cell as two and each machine should be assigned in one cell only. Effort has been made to develop an algorithm that is more reliable than conventional methods and some non-traditional optimization techniques like the genetic algorithm (GA) and the tabu search algorithm (TS) for solving machine cell formation problem. In the memetic algorithm approach local optimization is applied to each newly generated offspring at the end of genetic algorithm.