Multi-Objective Approaches for Designing Cellular Manufacturing Systems

Abstract

Manufacturing cell formation is an important stage in the development of cellular manufacturing systems. It focuses on grouping machines, parts, and workers and assigning them to appropriate cells. This assignment is guided by a number of objectives and is subject to a number of constraints. The focus of this work is on a variant of the cell formation problem known as the "Generalized Cubic Cell Formation Problem." To solve the problem, Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithms NSGA-II and its variant NRGA are developed. The performance of NSGA2 and NRGA has been evaluated in terms of the objectives considered and the computation time. The simulation results show that the overall performance of NSGA-II and NRGA algorithms is satisfactory. The NRGA, on the other hand, had a longer execution time.