An Enhanced Grouping Genetic Algorithm for solving the cell formation problem

International audienceCell formation is often the first step in solving facility layout design problems. The objective is to group part families and machines so that they can be assigned to manufacturing cells. The cell formation problem is a non-deterministic polynomial (NP) complete problem which means that the time taken to produce solutions increases exponentially with problem size. This paper presents the Enhanced Grouping Genetic Algorithm (EnGGA) that has been developed for solving the cell formation problem. The EnGGA replaces the replacement heuristic in a standard Grouping Genetic Algorithm with a Greedy Heuristic and employs a rank-based roulette-elitist strategy, which is a new mechanism for creating successive generations. The EnGGA was tested using well-known data sets from the literature. The quality of the solutions was compared with those produced by other methods using the grouping efficacy measure. The results show that the EnGGA is effective and outperforms or matches the other methods