A PSO-Based Clustering Algorithm for Manufacturing Cell Design

Different metaheuristic methods have been used to solve clustering problems. This paper addresses the problem of manufacturing cell formation using a modified particle swarm optimisation (PSO) algorithm. The main modification made to the original PSO algorithm consists on that in this work it is not used the vector of velocities as the standard PSO algorithm does. The proposed algorithm uses the concept of proportional likelihood with modifications, a technique that is used in data mining techniques. Some simulations are presented and compared. The criterion used to group the machines in cells is based on the minimization of inter-cell movements. The computational results show that the PSO algorithm is able to find the optimal solutions on almost all instances.