Modelling of Optimal Design of Manufacturing Cell Layout Considering Material Flow and Closeness Rating Factors

TL;DR

This paper presents a mathematical model and a simulated annealing-based metaheuristic to optimize manufacturing cell layout design, focusing on material flow and closeness ratings, to reduce handling costs.

Contribution

It introduces an adapted mathematical model for cell layout considering material handling and closeness, and applies a novel metaheuristic approach to solve NP-hard problems efficiently.

Findings

Metaheuristic achieves high-quality solutions

Approach reduces material handling costs

Method demonstrates computational efficiency

Abstract

Developing a group of machine cells and their corresponding part families to minimize the inter-cell and intra-cell material flow is the basic objective of the designing of a cellular manufacturing system (CMS). Afterwards achieving a competent cell layout is essential in order to minimize the total inter-cell part travels, which is principally noteworthy. There are plentiful articles of CMS literature which considered cell formation problems; however cell layout topic has rarely been addressed. Therefore this research is intended to focus on an adapted mathematical model of the layout design problem considering material handling cost and closeness ratings of manufacturing cells. Owing to the combinatorial class of the said problem, an efficient NP-hard technique based on Simulated Annealing metaheuristic is proposed henceforth. Some test problems are solved using the proposed technique. Computational results show that the proposed metaheuristic approach is extremely effective and efficient in terms of solution quality and computational complexity.