Article ID: | iaor20081195 |
Country: | United States |
Volume: | 18 |
Issue: | 2 |
Start Page Number: | 77 |
End Page Number: | 97 |
Publication Date: | Jun 2006 |
Journal: | International Journal of Flexible Manufacturing Systems |
Authors: | Glover Fred, Alidaee Bahram, Kochenberger Gary, Wang Haibo |
Keywords: | heuristics: tabu search |
This paper presents a new clique partitioning (CP) model for the Group Technology (GT) problem. The new model, based on a novel 0/1 quadratic programming formulation, addresses multiple objectives in GT problems by drawing on production relationships to assign differing weights to machine/part pairs. The use of this model, which is readily solved by a basic tabu search heuristic, is illustrated by solving 36 standard test problems from the literature. The efficiency of our new CP model is further illustrated by solving three large scale problems whose linear programming relaxations are much too large to be solved by CPLEX. An analysis of the quality of the solutions produced along with comparisons made with other models and methods highlight both the attractiveness and robustness of the proposed method.