Amin Aalaei, - Department of Industrial Engineering & Management Systems Amirkabir University of Technology, Tehran, Iran
Hamid Davoudpour
Elnaz Nikoofarid
Iraj Mahdavi

In this paper, an attempt is made to solve the cell formation problem and minimize the number of voids and exceptional elements in a three dimensional (cubic) machinepart-worker incidence matrix. Then, we introduce a nonlinear mathematical model which cannot be solved efficiently for large-sized problems due to its NP-hardness.To solve the proposed model for real size applications, a Simulated Annealing (SA) algorithm is utilized. To illustrate the performance of the proposed model and verify the computational efficiency of the developed algorithm in comparison with the Lingo software, computational resultsare presented by solving 16 test problems. The obtained results show that this algorithm provides an optimal solution for the most of the test problems in a reasonable computational time.

Cellular manufacturing, Worker flexibility, Exceptional elements, Voids, Mathematical model, Simulated Annealing