Study of buffer effects on the grouping efficacy measure of stochastic cell formation problem

This paper deals the stochastic cell formation problem (SCFP). The paper presents a new nonlinear integer programming model for the SCFP in which the effect of buffer size on the grouping efficacy of cells has been investigated. The objective function is the maximization of the grouping efficacy of cells. A chance constraint is applied to explore the effect of buffer on the SCFP. Processing time and arrival time of the part for each cell are considered stochastic and are following exponential probability distribution. To find out the optimal solution in a reasonable time, a heuristic approach is used to linearize the proposed nonlinear model. This problem has been known as an NP-hard problem. Therefore, two metaheuristic methods, namely; genetic algorithm and particle swarm optimization are employed to solve examples. The parameters of the algorithms are calibrated using Taguchi and full factorial methods, and the performances of the algorithms on the examples of various sizes are analyzed against global solutions obtained from Lingo software’s branch and bound (B&B) in terms of quality of solutions and computational time.