A discrete gravitational search algorithm for solving the cell formation problem

Abstract

Nowadays, the cellular manufacturing system is thriving into the industrial field due to the higher provided profits and quality of products. Moreover, the manufacturing cell formation problem is considered as the most studied implementation of the cellular manufacturing system. Therefore, a novel gravitational Search Algorithm was introduced and applied to the cell formation problem in this paper. According to the obtained results, the novel gravitational Search Algorithm provides good quality solutions with a reasonable computational time. In the original discrete Gravitational Search Algorithm the exploration strategy was performed by means of a mutation operator applied several times to a solution. To decrease the complexity of the algorithm and the computational time a crossover operator; equivalent to the application of the mutation operator for a number of times; is presented. A modified Local Search algorithm is performed to seek more extensively the solution space. The performance of the novel Gravitational Search Algorithm adaptation was evaluated on a set of 35 benchmarks from the literature. According to the obtained results and to the comparative study, the novel Gravitational Search Algorithm is considered as one of the best algorithms.