MANUFACTURING CELL-FORMATION USING SIMILARITY COEFFICIENTS AND A PARALLEL GENETIC TSP ALGORITHM - FORMULATION AND COMPARISON

Many algorithms have been proposed to form manufacturing cells from co mponent routings. However, many of these do not have the capability of solving large problems. We propose a procedure using similarity coeff icients and a parallel genetic implementation of a TSP algorithm that is capable of solving large problems of up to 1000 parts and 1000 mach ines. In addition, we also compare our procedure with many existing pr ocedures using nine well-known problems from the literature. The resul ts show that the proposed procedure compares well with the existing pr ocedures and should be useful to practitioners and researchers.