Manufacturing cell design using simulated annealing-An industrial application

In this paper, the authors give a brief summary of simulated annealing (SA) procedures used to solve combinatorial optimization problems. They then present the manufacturing cell design problem which consists of designing cells of limited size in order to minimize inter-cell traffic. The authors show how to use a SA approach to obtain a good, if not optimum, solution to this problem. Finally, they apply this approach to an industrial problem and compare the results to the ones obtained using the so-called twofold heuristic algorithm.