A Fuzzy Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm for a Cell Formation Problem

Group technology (GT) is a useful way to increase productivity with high quality in cellular manufacturing systems (CMSs), in which cell formation (CF) is a key step in the GT philosophy. When boundaries between groups are fuzzy, fuzzy clustering has been successfully adapted to solve the CF problem; however, it may result uneven distribution of parts/machines where the problem becomes larger. In this case, particle swarm optimization (PSO) can be used to tackle such a hard problem. This paper proposes a hybrid algorithm based on the fuzzy clustering and particle swarm optimization (FPSO) to solve the given CF problem. We experiment a number of examples to show the efficiency of the proposed algorithm and find that our proposed FPSO algorithm is able to obtain good results at reasonable time. Keywords-- Cellular manufacturing systems, cell formation, fuzzy clustering, particle swarm optimization (PSO)

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2009
• Where: EUSFLAT
• Authors: Esmaeil Mehdizadeh, Reza Tavakkoli-Moghaddam
• Keywords: Cellular Manufacturing Systems, CF Problem, EUSFLAT 2009, Fuzzy Clustering, Fuzzy Logic