Resolving the manufacturing cell design problem via hunting search

Abstract

The Manufacturing Cell Design Problems consists in divide a production plant into cells, through which the machines and their processed parts are grouped. The main goal is to build an optimal design that reduces the movements of parts among cells. In this paper, we resolve this problem using a recent population-based metaheuristic called Hunting Search. This technique is inspired by the behavior of a herd of animals working together to hunt a prey. The experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed approach, which reach all global optimums for a set of 27 well-known instances.