Cell formation in manufacturing systems through simulated annealing: An experimental evaluation

Simulated annealing is a general random search method for finding near-global optimal solutions for optimization problems and, in particular, for certain NP-complete problems in combinatorial optimization. This paper presents an algorithm based on simulated annealing to solve the machine-component grouping problem for the design of cells in a manufacturing system. The proposed algorithm has been tested on sample problems and is senstivity to some of its parameters, investigated. When compared with the K-means algorithm, the algorithm fares better for large problems. It is also easy to implement.