A tabu search approach to the cell formation problem

The formation of machine cells and part families is a central issue in the design of cellular production systems In this paper, we propose a tabu search based approach to deal with this problem by modeling it as a "Shortest Spanning Path" problem with respect to both parts and machines. A comparison of the proposed method with some of the existing methods is presented. Our results revealed that the proposed approach possesses several advantages that make it capable of handling the problem addressed in this paper as it exists in real-world situations.