Two-Stage Inter-Cell Layout Design for Cellular Manufacturing by Using Ant Colony Optimization Algorithms

Facility layout planning plays an important role in the manufacturing process and seriously impacts a company’s profitability. A well-planned layout can significantly reduce the total material handling cost. The purpose of this paper is to develop a two-stage inter-cell layout optimization approach by using one of the popular meta-heuristics — the Ant Colony Optimization algorithm. At the first stage, the cells are formed based on the part-machine clustering results obtained through the ant system algorithm. In other words, we get the initial inter-cell layout after this stage. The work at the second stage uses a hybrid ant system algorithm to improve the solution obtained at previous stage. Different performance measures are also employed in this paper to evaluate the results.