GRASP with path relinking for the manufacturing cell formation problem considering part processing sequence.

In this study, a hybrid heuristic is proposed for the Manufacturing Cell Formation Problem considering part processing sequence. The hybrid heuristic is based on a GRASP heuristic and then it uses a path relinking strategy on a set of elite solutions obtained by GRASP. The proposed GRASP heuristic constructs feasible solutions using a two-stage randomised greedy procedure, that are improved with a local search procedure. This procedure explores two neighbourhoods: machine reassignments and machine interchanges. The path relinking is used as an intensification strategy to improve the GRASP solutions. The performance of the proposed heuristic is evaluated with data-sets from the literature and a set of larger size instances randomly generated. The obtained results show that the GRASP heuristic provides optimal or near optimal solutions with very small computational burden. These results are further improved with a Path Relinking strategy. The most remarkable features of the proposed heuristic are its simplicity and its ease of implementation.