A revised model for solving the Cell formation problem and solving by gray wolf optimization algorithm

The Cellular Manufacturing System (CMS) is one of the most efficient systems for production environments with high volume and product variety which takes advantage of group technology. In the cellular production system, similar parts called part families are assigned to a production cell having similar production methods, and the needed machines are dedicated to cells. Determining part families and allocating the necessary machines to the production cell is known as the Cell Formation Problem (CFP) which is known as an NP-Hard problem. Safaei and Tavakkoli-Moghaddam (2009a) proposed a model that is widely used in literature which suffers some killer weaknesses highly affecting subsequent researches. In this paper, the mentioned model is modified and revised to fix these major issues. Besides, due to the NP-Hard nature of the problem, a meta-heuristic algorithm based on Gray Wolf Optimization (GWO) approach is also developed for solving the revised model on the sample examples and the results are compared. Simulation results indicated that the proposed method can reduce the total cost of the manufacturing system by 3% in comparison with the base model. Furthermore, simulation results of five sample problems indicate the better performance of the proposed method comparing with Lingo and PSO.