Swarm intelligence in cellular manufacturing: application of hybrid ant system to manufacturing cell machine layout problem

This paper analyzes the intra-cell machine re-layout (ICMRL) problem in the context of cellular manufacturing (CM). The proposed method for ICMRL has two phases. First phase consists of a general cell formation procedure in which the initial machine layout is obtained. In the second phase, we formulate ICMRL as a quadratic assignment problem model. Then an ant inspired swarm intelligence approach is used to develop a set of better solution. Since the automated guided vehicles (AGVs) are commonly used to transport materials between manufacturing cells, the impact of their guide path characteristics on the final machine layout plan is also considered to find an optimal solution.