A TSP-based heuristic for forming machine groups and part families

Cellular manufacturing has been proposed as a layout approach to improve manufacturing efficiency and productivity. In implementing cellular manufacturing, parts are grouped into part families based on their similarity in manufacturing, and machines are grouped into machine cells to reduce intercellular movement of parts. To model the cellular manufacturing problem, a machine-part incidence matrix is often used. A cell formation algorithm must produce machine cells and associated part families to minimize intercellular movement of parts. In this paper, the cell formation problem is formulated as a travelling salesman problem (TSP) and a solution methodology based on genetic algorithms (GAs) is proposed to solve the TSP-cell formation problem. The proposed algorithm is compared very favourably to a well-known algorithm available in the literature.