Integrated Optimization to Cell Formation, Cell Layout, and Group Scheduling for Dynamic Cellular Manufacturing System

The design of dynamic cellular manufacturing systems (DCMS) has gained significant attention in recent years. Cell formation (CF), cell layout (CL), and group scheduling (GS) are closely interrelated in DCMS design. However, most studies focus on one or two aspects, leading to higher reconfiguration costs and lower production efficiency. To address this issue, this paper proposes an integrated optimization approach for CF, CL, and GS. A mathematical model is formulated with total makespan and reconfiguration cost as objectives. A multi-scale neighborhood search heuristic algorithm (MSNSH) is developed, featuring sequence pair encoding to ensure feasible layouts, machine-swap-based and cell-swap-based neighborhood searches for efficiency, and adaptive cell number adjustment to avoid local optima. Experimental results on various test instances demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of MSNSH in solving the proposed problem.