Authors: Jiaxiang Luo Lixin Tang
Publish Date: 2009/01/01
Volume: 40, Issue: 3-4, Pages: 362-372
Abstract
One of the fundamental problems in cellular manufacturing is grouping products with similar features into families and associated machines into cells The objective is to maximize grouping efficacy which indicates the withincell machine utilization and the intercell movement In this paper a novel hybrid approach combining ordinal optimization OO and iterated local search ILS is presented to solve it in a short time The hybrid algorithm takes ordinal optimization as the main framework while ILS is embedded in the framework as a subprocedure In each iteration of the algorithm according to OO strategy r best solutions are accepted as the initial solutions for the embedded ILS in turn From each initial solution H solutions are generated and totally rH “good enough” solutions are obtained For the ILS algorithm a verylarge scale neighborhood cyclic transfer neighborhood is adopted the characteristic of which is several products moving simultaneously in a cyclical manner A reinforcement kick strategy is also proposed for the ILS algorithm in which the products and machines are regrouped according to the current grouping relationships between products and machines Computational experience on a set of group technology problems available in the literature shows the efficiency of the new hybrid algorithm The results obtained by the hybrid algorithm are comparable to those obtained by other known algorithm in the literature for the problem
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