Solving a multi-criteria group scheduling problem for a cellular manufacturing system by scatter search

This article presents a group scheduling problem for manufacturing cells, in which parts may visit different cells. By addressing intra-cell scheduling, the sequence of parts within manufacturing cells is determined; however, in inter-cell scheduling, the sequence of cells is obtained. A novel mathematical model is presented for a multi-criteria group scheduling problem in a cellular manufacturing system with respect to a design objective function minimizing the makespan and costs of intra-cell movement, tardiness, and sequence-dependent setup, simultaneously. Obtaining an optimal solution for this type of complex, large-sized problem in reasonable computational time using traditional approaches and optimization tools is extremely difficult. Thus, we develop a meta-heuristic algorithm based on scatter search (SS) to solve the foregoing model. The related results confirm the efficiency and effectiveness of our proposed SS algorithm, which finds good solutions, especially for medium- and large-sized problems.