Abstract:   Traditionally, the intracell and intercell layout problems in layout design of cellular manufacturing systems are solved separately, which may result in a local optimal solution. In order to avoid the local optimal solution, these two problems are solved concurrently in this paper. This problem is formulated as an integer programming with multiple objectives. In the model, the orientation of the facilities, the intracell and intercell layout are described simultaneously. Due to the complexity of the model, an improved particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is proposed. To improve its performance, the PSO algorithm is modified by adopting the crossover operator used in genetic algorithm. A simulation experiment verifies the validity of the proposed method.   

Key words: cellular manufacturing, facility layout, particle swarm optimization (PSO), multiobjective optimization