A Study For Manufacturing Cell Formation Approach Considering Setup

This paper proposes a comparison among the exact methods Rank Ordered Cluster, Single Linkage Clustering and the metaheuristics Tabu Search and Genetic Algorithm for Manufacturing Cell Formation Problem. The Manufacturing Cell Formation consists of group machines for processing similar parts or components in order to minimize setup time. Setup time can be defined as the period of downtime between the processing of two consecutive batches. To validate the algorithms results, a metric, group efficacy, is applied to determine the result quality, moreover, the results are compared with examples in the literature.