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Manufacturing cell formation by state-space search

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Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of grouping machines in order to design cellular manufacturing cells, with an objective to minimize inter-cell flow. This problem is related to one of the major aims of group technology (GT): to decompose the manufacturing system into manufacturing cells that are as independent as possible. This problem is NP-hard. Thus, nonheuristic methods cannot address problems of typical industrial dimensions because they would require exorbitant amounts of computing time, while fast heuristic methods may suffer from poor solution quality. We present a branch-and-bound state-space search algorithm that attempts to overcome both these deficiencies. One of the major strengths of this algorithm is its efficient branching and search strategy. In addition, the algorithm employs the fast Inter-Cell Traffic Minimization Method to provide good upper bounds, and computes lower bounds based on a relaxation of merging.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Hughes STX Corporation, 7701 Greenbelt Road, Suite 400, 20770, Greenbelt, MD, USA

    Subrata Ghosh

  2. Indian Institute of Management, P.O. Box 16757, 700027, Calcutta, India

    Ambuj Mahanti

  3. Department of Industrial Engineering, State University of New York at Buffalo, 14260, Buffalo, NY, USA

    Rakesh Nagi

  4. Department of Computer Science, Institute for Systems Research, and Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, University of Maryland, 20742, College Park, MD, USA

    Dana S. Nau

Authors
  1. Subrata Ghosh
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  2. Ambuj Mahanti
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  3. Rakesh Nagi
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  4. Dana S. Nau
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Additional information

This work was supported in part by NSF Grants DDM-9201779, IRI-9306580, and NSFD EEC 94-02384 in the US, and the CMDS project (work order 019/7-148/CMDS-1039/90-91) in India. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

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Ghosh, S., Mahanti, A., Nagi, R. et al. Manufacturing cell formation by state-space search. Ann Oper Res 65, 35–54 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02187326

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