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Business & Economics

A NOVEL APPROACH TO SOLVE CELL FORMATION PROBLEMS WITH ALTERNATIVE ROUTING USING PARTICLE SWARM OPTIMISATION⁸
Ahmad Hashemi, Hamed Gholami, Uday Venkatadri, Anas A. Salameh, Mostafa Jafari, Georges Abdul-Nour

ABSTRACT. Cell formation is the most important step to designing cellular manufacturing systems. Dealing with cell formation problems leads the cellular manufacturing systems to a better configuration. Particle swarm optimisation algorithm has been taken into account to solve cell formation problems since it is an algorithm with the capability of both local and global bases. However, applying particle swarm optimisation to handle cellular manufacturing systems having alternative routes is a matter of consideration. Hence, the study aims to present a particle swarm optimisation based novel approach for cell formation problems having alternative routings with the goal of minimising inter-cell moves.
The applied approach provides a very near optimal solution with only one change in configuration of parts compared with the best-known solution achieved by the exact method. Finally, computational results of the applied approach propose a new tuned optimisation scenario for cellular manufacturing systems with alternative routes. This approach shows that particle swarm optimisation with a number of particles as close as possible to the number of parts, inertia weights in proportion to maximum and a minimum number of alternative routings and learning factors with a normal value equal to 2 can achieve a very optimal answer during a lower amount of time.

KEYWORDS:  group technology; cellular manufacturing systems; cell formation, particle swarm optimisation; inter-cell moves.

JEL classification:  C61, L10, L60.

⁸Acknowledgments:  This work was supported in part by the Research Management Centre at Universiti Teknologi Malaysia and the Ministry of Higher Education under the Postdoctoral Fellowship Scheme (PDRU Grant), Vot No Q.J130000.21A2.05E33.