Abstract
Despite the long history of the cell formation problem (CF) and availability of dozens of approaches, very few of them explicitly optimize the objective of cell formation. These scarce approaches usually lead to intractable formulations that can be solved only heuristically for practical instances. In contrast, we show that CF can be explicitly modelled via the minimum multicut problem and solved to optimality in practice (for moderately sized instances). We consider several real-world constraints that can be included into the proposed formulations and provide experimental results with real manufacturing data.
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank prof. Jannes Slomp (University of Groningen, Department of Operations) for his help in obtaining industrial data and suggestion to consider the issue of identical machines. Boris Goldengorin is partially supported by LATNA Laboratory, NRU HSE, RF government grant, ag. 11.G34.31.0057 and the grant “Teachers-Students” No. 11-04-0008 “Calculus for tolerances in combinatorial optimization: theory and algorithms”.
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Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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Krushinsky, D., Goldengorin, B. An exact model for cell formation in group technology. Comput Manag Sci 9, 323–338 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10287-012-0146-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10287-012-0146-2