A discrete particle swarm optimisation approach for manufacturing cell formation

Manufacturers need to improve the efficiency and productivity of their production activities to meet fluctuating demand for customised products with shorter life-cycles. Cellular manufacturing is one of the important manufacturing philosophies to achieve manufacturing flexibility. In the past, many methods have been developed for cell formation problem using zero-one machine part incidence matrix but such an approach can hardly incorporate real life production factors resulting in inefficient cell design. In the proposed approach, similarity coefficient is determined using various real life production factors. A discrete particle swarm optimisation approach is adopted to form the cluster of machines through maximising similarity coefficient within the cell and minimising similarity coefficient between the different cells. The proposed approach is tested on benchmark problems of different size from open literature for its performance using group technology efficiency and system utilisation.