Cell Forming and Cell Balancing of Virtual Cellular Manufacturing Systems with Alternative Processing Routes Using Genetic Algorithm

Cellular manufacturing (CM) is one of the most important subfields in the design of manufacturing systems. As a recently emerged field of study and practice, virtual cellular manufacturing (VCM) is of enormous importance as one of the types of CM . One kind of VCM problems is VCM with alternative processing routes from which the route for processing each part should be selected. In this study, a biobjective mathematical programming model is designed in order to obtain optimal routing of parts, the layout of machines and the assignment of cells to locations while minimizing the production costs and balancing the cell loads. The proposed mathematical model is solved by multi-choice goal programming (MCGP). Since CM models are NP-Hard, a genetic algorithm (GA) is utilized to solve the model for large-sized problem instances and the results obtained from both methods are compared. Finally, a conclusion is reached and some suggestions for future works are offered.