GENETICALLY ASSISTED OPTIMIZATION OF CELL LAYOUT AND MATERIAL FLOW PATH SKELETON

A continuous plane manufacturing cell layout and intercell flow path s keleton problem formulation involving rectilinear distances between ce ll input/output stations is mapped to a genetic search space. Certain properties of such a search space are exploited to design a very effic ient method for reduction of a mixed-integer programming problem formu lation to an iterative sequence of linear programming problems. This p aper reports theoretical and computational insights for efficiently fi nding good solutions for the above problem formulation, taking advanta ge of the solution structure and the search stage. The scores of the o bjective function on a set of test cases indicate better solutions tha n those previously reported in the literature. The empirical results b ased on multiple runs also suggest that the method generates final res ults that are not dependent on the quality of the initial solution; he nce the solution search seems to be more global than many of the previ ous approaches.