Ant colony optimization algorithm to the inter-cell layout problem in cellular manufacturing

The inter-cell layout problem is discussed and a mathematical formulation for material flow between the cells is presented. The problem is modeled as a quadratic assignment problem (QAP). An ant algorithm is developed to solve the formulated problem. The performance of the proposed ant algorithm is compared to the facility layout algorithms such as H63, HC63-66, CRAFT and Bubble Search as well as other existing ant colony implementations for QAP such as FANT, HAS-QAP, MMAS-QAP2-opt, and ANTS algorithms. The experimental results show that the proposed ant algorithm performs significantly better than the facility layout algorithms. Also, our experimental results reveal that the proposed ant algorithm is effective and efficient as compared to other existing ant algorithms.