Manufacturing Cell Formation Problem Using Hybrid Cuckoo Search Algorithm

Cellular manufacturing, as one of the most important applications of Group Technology, has gained popularity in both academic research and industrial applications. The cell formation problem is considered the first and the foremost issue faced in the designing of cellular manufacturing systems that attempts to minimize the inter-cell movement of the products while maximize the machines utilization. This paper presents an adapted optimization algorithm entitled the cuckoo search algorithm for solving this kind of problems. The proposed method is tested on different benchmark problems; the obtained results are then compared to others available in the literature. The comparison result reveals that on 31 out of 35 problems (88.57%) the results of the introduced method are among the best results.