Clonal Selection Algorithm for the Cell Formation Problem

The cell formation problem attempts to group machines and part families in dedicated manufacturing cells such that the inter-cell movement of the products are minimized while the machine utilization are maximized. In this paper, a clonal selection algorithm is proposed for solving this problem. This algorithm introduces theories of clonal selection, hypermutation and receptor edit to construct an evolutionary searching mechanism which is used for exploration. A local search mechanism is integrated to exploit local optima. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, most widely used benchmark problems are solved and the obtained results are compared with different methods collected from the literature. The results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is a very effective and performs well on all test problems.