A two-stage model for cell formation problem considering the inter-cellular movements by automated guided vehicles

This paper addresses to the Cell Formation Problem (CFP) in which Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) have been employed to transfer the jobs which may need to visit one or more cells. Because of added constraints to problem such as AGVs’ conflict and excessive cessation on one place, it is possible that AGVs select the different paths from one cell to another over the time. This means that the times and costs between cells are dynamic. The proposed model consists of 2 stages that stage (1) is related to a basic CFP, with a set of machine cells and their corresponding job families, while stage (2) is related to finding AGVs’ routing, to determine the dynamic costs. For solving this problem, a two-stage heuristic algorithm based on an exact method has been proposed. A computational experiment has been solved to show efficiency of proposed heuristic.