Applying an Electromagnetism-like algorithm for solving the manufacturing cell design problem

Group technology has acquired a great consideration in the last years. This technique allows including the advantages of serial production to any manufacturing industry by dividing a manufacturing plant into a set of machine-part cells. The identification and formation of the cells are known as the Manufacturing Cell Design Problem (MCDP), which is an NP-hard problem. In this paper, the authors propose to solve the problem through a swarm intelligence metaheuristic called ElectroMagnetism-like (EM-like) algorithm, which is inspired by the attraction-repulsion mechanism of particles in the context of the electromagnetic theory. The original EM-like algorithm was designed for solving continuous optimization problems, while the MCDP is usually formulated by assuming a binary approach. Hence, the authors propose an adaptation of this algorithm for addressing the problem. Such adaptation is applied for solving a freely available dataset of the MCDP, obtaining competitive results compared to recent approaches.