Optimisation of manufacturing cell formation with extended great deluge meta‐heuristic approach

The concepts of cellular manufacturing system (CMS) and cell scheduling (CS) have been widely used to meet various production needs. The CMS is a particular case of group technology (GT) applied to improve the production efficiency and reduce operational costs. This work addresses the machine/part grouping and group scheduling problems. The cell formation problem has long been recognised as the most challenging problem in realising the concept of cellular manufacturing. It belongs to the class of NP‐hard problems. One of the most important problems in the area of production management is the scheduling problem which has also been proven to be NP‐hard. To solve this scheduling problem an Extended Great Deluge (EGD) meta‐heuristic approach is employed. The results of the proposed approach show a major improvement when compared with the results of one of the best algorithms developed so far by other researchers.