The cell formation problem is one of the first issues faced in the designing of cellular manufacturing systems. In this paper, a new solution approach based on the artificial immune system algorithm is presented for the problem with the aim of maximizing the grouping efficacy. To intensify the search, the proposed method is refined by a tabu search algorithm. Numerical results confirm the effectiveness of the method since it can reach the best known solutions of 30 most widely used benchmark problems in short computational time. Compared with different methods collected from the literature, the proposed algorithm performs well on all test problems.
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