A novel approach to determine cell formation, cell layout, and intracellular machine layout

Formation of manufacturing cell, determination of cell layout and intracellular machine layout are three basic steps in the design of cellular manufacturing system (CMS). However, cell formation problem and cell layout problem are NP-hard combinational problems. It is difficult to obtain optimal solutions in an acceptable length of time, especially for large-sized problems. This paper proposes a novel approach, water flow-like algorithm (WFA), to tackle this problem. When compared with the mathematical programming approach which took one hour to solve problem, the proposed algorithm is able to produce optimal solution in less than one second. This shows that the proposed approach is extremely effective and efficient.