Evolutionary strategy for manufacturing cell design

The problem of grouping parts into families and machines into cells (manufacturing cell formation problem) is considered with the objective of maximizing the grouping efficacy. A non-specialized and non-hybridized evolutionary strategy (ES) is proposed and analyzed for solving this problem. The algorithm uses a modified permutation with separators encoding scheme and unique concept of separators' movements during mutation. The set of experiments confirmed that the proposed approach outperforms any known heuristics. For 7 out of 34 problems considered, better solutions have been found (with the same number of cells as in literature), as compared to the previously published results. Moreover, there are 5 problems for which ES has produced the best known solutions with different number of cells than from the literature.