Cell formation using a simulated annealing algorithm with variable neighbourhood

The broad applications of cellular manufacturing make the cell formation problem (CFP) a core subject in the field of manufacturing. Due to the combinatorial nature of the CFP, a simulated annealing-based meta-heuristic with variable neighbourhood was developed to form part-machine cells. To validate and verify the proposed approach, computational experiments were conducted on a set of CFPs from the literature. Using the grouping efficacy as a performance criterion, the proposed approach is shown to outperform existing state-of-the-art algorithms by exceeding or matching the best known solutions in the majority of the test problems. The evaluation results clearly show that this study successfully develops an effective approach for CFPs. [Submitted 25 July 2009; Revised 22 October 2009, 11 November 2009; Accepted 12 November 2009]