The use of memetic algorithm in operations scheduling of cellular manufacturing systems with makespan

This paper presents a group scheduling problem for manufacturing cells, in which parts may visit different cells. By addressing intra-cell scheduling, the sequence of parts within manufacturing cells is determined. In inter-cell scheduling however, the sequence of cells is obtained. Due to the complexity of this problem, a memetic algorithm (MA) is proposed to solve such a hard problem. The performance of proposed MA is shown and evaluated on 10 test problems. The computational results reveal that the proposed MA performs better than the Lingo software in these test problems with respect to the average elapsed time to obtain makespan.