A clonal selection algorithm for the generalized cell formation problem considering machine reliability and alternative routings

The cell formation is the first step in the design of Cellular Manufacturing systems. It consists of grouping parts with similar processing needs into cells and identifying the set of machines needed to process these parts. The aim is to minimize the material handling costs and maximize the use of the machines. In this paper, the machine reliability and the alternative process routings are taken into account to form the production cells. The presence of these factors in addition to the production volume, operation sequence and production time makes the problem more realistic but also more complex. Most authors solve this kind of problems by mathematical programming approaches that require large amounts of computational efforts. Therefore, a modified version of the Clonal Selection Algorithm is introduced and a local search mechanism is adopted in this paper. The obtained results are compared with those of the Branch and Bound (B&B) method using LINGO software. The comparison reveals the effectiveness and the efficiency of the proposed method in terms of both solution quality and computation time required.