Designing cellular manufacturing systems: branch-and-bound and A* approaches

In this paper heuristic and optimal algorithms for solving the group technology problem are presented. The heuristic algorithm is based on a branch-and-bound concept. A quadratic programming model for the machine grouping problem is formulated. The A* algorithm is developed for optimal solving of the machine grouping problem. The performance of the heuristic branch-and-bound method and the A* algorithm is compared with several existing heuristics.