Designing Manufacturing Cells Using a Tabu Search Approach

We present a Tabu Search scheme for the solution of the NP-hard part of the manufacturing cells formation problem, on a simplified yet concise model which adequately fits to practice. The design can then be finalized using simple methods to incorporate additional parameters. This scheme integrates in a systematic way proper short and long-term memory structures and an overall search strategy for their use. At the code development stage, special care was taken to enhance the explorative capability of the algorithm by correlating hash information with the values of the search parameters. The resulting algorithm is robust and produces more than promising results for problems with up to 30 machines, with negligible computational effort. In the absence of known optimal solutions for larger dimensions and therefore of a testing benchmark, fine-tuning may be required. This could be achieved by incorporating dynamic parameters in the place of the static ones.