Manufacturing cell formation: A dual-objective simulated annealing approach

A dual-objective simulated annealing approach is developed for the purpose of concurrently forming machine cells and part families for cellular manufacturing. Simulated annealing has proved to be very effective in handling a variety of NP-hard problems. Originally, the simulated annealing algorithm was designed for applications with a single objective. For forming machine cells based on a machine-component incidence matrix, the result from single-objective simulated annealing was found to have room for improvement. In order to improve the performance of simulated annealing, a dual-objective approach is developed. The result clearly demonstrates the oustanding capabilities of the dual-objective approach. The discussions are illustrated with examples.