Browsing by Author "Wu, Tai-Hsi"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4

A simulated annealing algorithm for manufacturing cell formation problems
(2008-04-01)
Wu, Tai-Hsi
;
Chang, Chin-Chih
;
Chung, Shu-Hsing
;
工業工程與管理學系
;
Department of Industrial Engineering and Management
The cell formation problem determines the decomposition of the manufacturing cells of a production system in which machines are assigned to these cells to process one or more part families so that each cell is operated independently and the intercellular movements are minimized or the number of parts flow processed within cells is maximized. In this study, a simple yet effective simulated annealing-based approach, SACF, is proposed to solve the cell formation problem. Considerable efforts are devoted to the design of parts and machine assignment procedures to direct SACF to converge to solutions with good values of grouping efficacy. A set of 25 test problems with various sizes drawn from the literature is used to test the performance of the proposed heuristic algorithm. The corresponding results are compared to several well-known algorithms published. The comparative study shows that the proposed SACF algorithm improves the grouping efficacy for 72% of the test problems. The proposed algorithm should thus be useful to both practitioners and researchers. (C) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
A water flow-like algorithm for manufacturing cell formation problems
(2010-09-01)
Wu, Tai-Hsi
;
Chung, Shu-Hsing
;
Chang, Chin-Chih
;
工業工程與管理學系
;
Department of Industrial Engineering and Management
Available research on the manufacturing cell formation problem shows that most solution approaches are either single- or multiple-solution-agent-based, with a fixed size of solution agents. Frequent problems encountered during the process of solving the cell formation problem include solutions being easily trapped in local optima and bad solution efficiency. Yang and Wang [Yang, F.-C., Wang, Y.-P., 2007. Water flow-like algorithm for object grouping problems. journal of the Chinese Institute of Industrial Engineers, 24(6). 475-488] proposed the water flow-like algorithm (WFA) to overcome the shortcomings of single- and multiple-solution-agent-based algorithms. WFA has the features of multiple and dynamic numbers of solution agents, and its mimicking of the natural behavior of water flowing from higher to lower levels coincides exactly with the process of searching for optimal solutions. This paper therefore adopts the WFA logic and designs a heuristic algorithm for solving the cell formation problem. Computational results obtained from running a set of 37 test instances from the literature and newly created have shown that the proposed algorithm has performed better than other benchmarking approaches both in solution effectiveness and efficiency, especially in large-sized problems. The superiority of the proposed WFACF over other approaches from the literature should be attributed to the collaboration of the WFA logic, the proposed prior estimation of the cell size, and the insertion-move. The WFA is a novel heuristic approach that deserves more attention. More attempts on adopting the WFA logic to solve many other combinatorial optimization problems are highly recommended. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
An efficient tabu search algorithm to the cell formation problem with alternative routings and machine reliability considerations
(2011-02-01)
Chung, Shu-Hsing
;
Wu, Tai-Hsi
;
Chang, Chin-Chih
;
工業工程與管理學系
;
Department of Industrial Engineering and Management
Cell formation is the first step in the design of cellular manufacturing systems. In this study, an efficient tabu search algorithm based on a similarity coefficient is proposed to solve the cell formation problem with alternative process routings and machine reliability considerations. In the proposed algorithm, good initial solutions are first generated and later on improved by a tabu search algorithm combining the mutation operator and an effective neighborhood solution searching mechanism. Computational experiences from test problems show that the proposed approach is extremely effective and efficient. When compared with the mathematical programming approach which took three hours to solve problems, the proposed algorithm is able to produce optimal solutions in less than 2 s. (C) 2010 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
Hybrid simulated annealing algorithm with mutation operator to the cell formation problem with alternative process routings
(2009-03-01)
Wu, Tai-Hsi
;
Chung, Shu-Hsing
;
Chang, Chin-Chih
;
工業工程與管理學系
;
Department of Industrial Engineering and Management
In this study, a hybrid simulated annealing algorithm with mutation operator is proposed to solve the manufacturing cell formation problem considering multiple process routings for parts, so that either the intercellular movements are minimized or the grouping efficacy is maximized, depending on the definition of the decision objective. The proposed algorithm is designed mainly to explore solution regions efficiently and to expedite the solution search process. The performance of the proposed algorithm is tested by a range of test problems, some of which are from the literature and some of which are generated within this study. The comparative study shows that the proposed algorithm improves the best results found in the literature for 28.6% of the test problems and the percentages of improvement are even higher than 18% in several test instances. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.