Joint determination of machine cells and linear intercell layout

The joint problem of manufacturing cell formation and its layout assignment is addressed in this paper, where machine cells are to be located along the popular bi-directional linear layout. The objective is to minimize the intercell flow cost under the cell size constraint, instead of the typical goal to minimize the number of intercell movements. An enhanced simulated annealing approach augmented with dynamic programming algorithm is developed, where the machine cells and their respective locations in the layout are simultaneously determined by dynamic programming. Consequently, the optimal number of machine cells is obtained by the problem structure, instead of a prior specification in most of the literature. The enhanced procedure is illustrated by an example and additional experiments, with data adapted from the literature, are performed to demonstrate the viability of the approach.