Abstract: A cell management problem in cellular manufacturing system considering parts with different routings processed on machines in multiple cells is studied. A nonlinear mathematical programming model of the problem is proposed by minimizing the flow time in a cellular manufacturing system. To solve the problem, a scatter search approach is developed. This scatter search approach improves diversification generator to generate a collection of diverse initial solutions, and develops the reference set update method, subset generation method, solution combination method and improvement method for the cell management problem. Compared with the benchmark optimization software CPLEX on a set of test problems, the simulation results show the effectiveness of the model and the approach.

Key words: Cell management, Cellular manufacturing, Scatter search