Comparative analysis between efficiency grouping and efficacy grouping in cell formation using the firefly metaheuristic algorithm

Abstract

Industrial environments can use several layout setups according to their convenience based on item diversity, ways of production and market demand. This work focuses on design of manufacturing cell formation. A well-known type of production layout in industrial engineering that allows meeting a diversity of production requirements and operational flexibility is the cellular manufacturing. Among the various techniques and approaches applied to manufacturing cell formation, this article uses the firefly metaheuristic algorithm as an optimization engine. Such modern stochastic optimization algorithm can tackle non-convex, non-smooth, non-continuous and non-differentiate objective cost functions making them gradient independent and suitable to manage such problems. The adopted methodology relies on comparing the obtained efficiency and efficacy (clustering) parameters in the cell formation layout with several well-established benchmark examples found in the literature. The results show that the use of efficacy parameter is desirable if the focus relies on clustering manufacturing cell formation, however, the use of efficiency parameter can also lead to useful and cost-effective layouts at the expense of cell clustering. Some of the results also indicate improvements in the efficacy parameter relative to the benchmarked examples with a slightly enhanced layout formation that proves and justifies the suitability for the firefly metaheuristic algorithm.

Concurrent scheduling and layout of virtual manufacturing cells considering assembly aspects

“…8 The majority of the studies conducted on the CM design have only focused on one of these decisions; examples of studies in this relation can be found. 9–17 However, it should be noted that these decisions are highly inter-dependent. For example, the parameters of the FL and scheduling problems such as the material flow between machines and processing times are highly affected by the CF decision, or the transfer time between machines is directly proportional to the distance between machines.…”

A two-stage novel approach using centre ordering of vectors on agglomerative hierarchical clustering for manufacturing cell formation

“…6 A comparison has been made between the efficiency and efficacy (clustering) parameters of the CF solution obtained through firefly meta-heuristic algorithm applied on several benchmarked problems. 18 It has been reported, out of the comparative analysis, that the application of efficacy parameter is desirable if the reliance is on clustering, although the application of efficiency parameter can also lead to beneficial and economical layouts at the cost of inadvertence of cell clustering.…”