Pareto-optimal front of cell formation problem in group technology

The earliest approaches to the cell formation problem in group technology, dealing with a binary machine-part incidence matrix, were aimed only at minimizing the number of intercell moves (exceptional elements in the block-diagonalized matrix). Later on this goal was extended to simultaneous minimization of the numbers of exceptions and voids, and minimization of intercell moves and within-cell load variation, respectively. In this paper we design the first exact branch-and-bound algorithm to create a Pareto-optimal front for the bi-criterion cell formation problem. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015