The Manufacturing Cell Formation Problem (MCFP) is a crucial component of a cell production design in a manufacturing system. This problem is composed by a set of parts of products to be manufactured and machines. The objective is to construct manufacturing clusters by associating products with cell machines. This paper presents a new hybrid evolutionary algorithm to solve the MCFP. Computational results with the proposed algorithm on a set of instances available in the literature are also presented. For 8 out of 36 instances considered, the propose method overcame the previous results from the literature and for 26 instances, the same best solutions were found.
heuristics; evolutionary algorithms; genetic algorithms