Abstract

The Manufacturing Cell Design Problem consists in the division of a manufacturing plant into cells, each one of them containing machines processing a group of parts. The goal is to increase the productivity by minimizing the exchange of material between cells. In this paper, we solve this problem by using Cuckoo Search, which is an easy-to-implement and fast-convergence metaheuristic inspired on the interesting reproduction strategy of cuckoo birds. We perform different experiments on a set of 90 well-known problem instances where our approach is able to reach the global optimum for all of them.