Designing cellular manufacturing systems by a truncated tree search

The cell formation problem in designing cellular manufacturing systems is formulated as a 0-1 qaudratic programming model. The objective of the model is to minimize intercellular moves using distance as a measure. A truncated tree search algorithm to solve the cell formation problem is presented. The performance of the algorithm is tested on several problems obtained from the literature. Comparison of the results of the algorithm with some existing approaches is presented. In addition, this paper extends the truncated tree search approach to deal with multiple machines in the cell formation problem.