Optimization of the material handling costs and the machine reliability in cellular manufacturing system using cuckoo search algorithm

摘要

Lean manufacturing is a systematic method to improve productivity and reduce costs for each industrial. One of the tools for lean is the cellular manufacturing that divides the production system into smaller subsystems. The objective is to reduce inventory, setup times, and material handling costs. The manufacturing cell formation problem presents the first issue faced in designing a cellular manufacturing system. In this paper, the presence of alternative process routings and machine reliability in addition to production volume, operation sequence and production time makes the problem more complex but also more realistic and appealing to real-world applications. Most authors solve this kind of problems by mathematical programming approaches that require large amounts of computational efforts. Therefore, a meta-heuristic algorithm, entitled Hybrid cuckoo search for the generalized cell formation problem, is considered in this paper. A set of benchmark problems with various scales is used to further evaluate the performance of the proposed method. Comparison of the results obtained with those obtained by LINGO and by the simulated annealing method reveals the better effectiveness and efficiency of our method.