An efficient tabu search approach to determine cell formation problem with consideration of cell layout

In this paper, a mathematical model is formulated to integrate cell formation and cell layout simultaneously with considerations of alternative process routings, operation sequences, production volume and different cellular layout type. Due to the combinatorial nature of cell formation problem and cell layout problem, an efficient tabu search (TS) approach has been proposed to address these issues. Several test instances from the literature are employed to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed solution algorithm. Computational experiences from test problems show that the proposed approach is extremely effective and efficient. When compared with the mathematical programming approach which took 34 hours to solve problems, the proposed algorithm is able to produce optimal solutions in less than 1 second. These comparisons show that the proposed approach is very effective, efficient and practical.