Cell formation in group technology: A combinatorial search approach

This paper addresses the cell formation problem in group technology. We develop two heuristic methods for generating solutions to the problem. These methods are based on two powerful combinatorial search methods—simulated annealing and tabu search. The performance of the heuristics is examined using randomly generated, published and industry data. The results indicate that the simulated annealing based heuristic is the preferred technique in the context of the problem addressed in this paper. Further, we also demonstrate that the simulated annealing based heuristic generates near-optimal solutions to the cell formation model formulated in this paper.