Computers ind. Engng Vol. 34, No. 2, pp.

309319, 1998
# 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved
PII: S0360-8352(97)00318-5 Printed in Great Britain
0360-8352/98 $19.00 + 0.00

AN IMPROVED SIMULATED ANNEALING FOR FACILITY

LAYOUT PROBLEMS IN CELLULAR MANUFACTURING
SYSTEMS
TAI-YUE WANG,* HER-CHANG LIN and KUEI-BIN WU
Department of Industrial Management Science, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan, the
Republic of China

(Received 16 October 1997)

AbstractIn this paper, we formulate a model solving both inter-cell and intra-cell facility layout pro-
blems for cellular manufacturing systems. This model minimizes the total material handling distance on
the shop oor. Due to the complexity of the problem, we propose an improved simulated annealing al-
gorithm to solve this problem. This algorithm modies the generation mechanism of neighborhood con-
gurations. This new generation mechanism can always generate a neighborhood conguration that
satises all of the zoning constraints. Then, the comparison between the improved simulated annealing
algorithm and Kouvelis's is conducted. The results show that the improved simulated annealing algor-
ithm produces the same solution quality while requiring less computation time as the problem size is
increased. # 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. INTRODUCTION

In recent years some major changes, such as variable customer demand, short product life
cycle, and increasing worldwide competition, have taken place in the manufacturing industry.
To meet these changes a company must be able to oer superior quality products at lower
cost than competitors and still remain exible if it wants to survive in the business world. To
achieve this goal, new manufacturing systems must be designed. In recent years, many manu-
facturing systems have been mentioned in papers. Among them, Cellular Manufacturing
Systems (CMS) combines the advantages of a job shop's exibility and a ow shop's eciency
and is considered one of the manufacturing systems that can meet the above challenges. CMS
provides the opportunity to reduce lead time, setup time, material handling and work in pro-
cess, etc. [1].
The main structure of CMS is shown in Fig. 1. It is composed of a nal assembly cell, subas-
sembly cells and manufacturing cells [1]. In these cells, each assembly and subassembly cell is
composed of manufacturing cells and workstations. CMS implements this in three stages [2]: (i)
cell formation; group the parts into part families and group the machines into machine cells by
the parts production process; (ii) facility layout; layout of the cells within the shop-oor (i.e.
inter-cell layout) and layout of the machines within each cell (i.e. intra-cell layout); and (iii)
scheduling; schedule of jobs in each cell. Among these stages, facility layout is the one that
results in dierent material ows and material handling costs.
Kusiak and Heragu [3] surveyed various formulations of the facility layout problem and the
algorithms for the solution of these problems. The facility layout problem has been modeled as:
(i) quadratic assignment problem (QAP), (ii) quadratic set covering problem, (iii) linear integer
programming problem, (iv) mixed integer programming problem, and (v) graph theoretic pro-
blem. Heragu [4] showed that the most popular model is formulated as QAP. The heuristic al-
gorithms are a good choice for solving facility layout problems due to the QAP being an NP-
complete problem. If the optimal algorithms are used, the memory and computation time will
be high as the problem size increases. Some ecient heuristic algorithms for the facility layout
problem are listed below [4]:

*To whom all correspondence should be addressed.

309
310 Tai-Yue Wang et al.

Fig. 1. The main structure of Cellular Manufacturing System [1].

2-way exchange algorithm;

3-way exchange algorithm;
Computerized Relative Allocation of Facilities Technique (CRAFT);
Modied Penalty (MP) algorithm;
Tabu Search (TS) algorithm;
Simulated Annealing (SA) algorithm.

Skorin-Kapov [5] made a comparison between TS and SA. The SA algorithm not only gener-
ated solutions as good as the TS algorithm but required less computation time for larger pro-
blems. Heragu and Alfa [6] compared the 2-way exchange algorithm, 3-way exchange algorithm,
MP algorithm, and SA algorithm. The SA algorithm was better than the others, on both sol-
ution quality and eciency. Jajodia et al. [7] compared CRAFT, SA algorithm, and other heur-
istic algorithms. They also arrived at the same conclusion. Similar comparisons in the literature
can be found in Kouvelis and Chiang [8].
The facility layout problem in CMS hasn't captured researchers' attention as much as cell for-
mation in the past two decades. The layout problem, however, plays an important role on the
shop oor. A poorly designed layout will result in poor productivity, increased work in process,
disordered material handling, and so on. Only a few researches have dealt with this subject.
Tzeng [9], and Twu [10] formulated models for solving facility layout problems in a single cell.
Alfa et al. [11] formulated a model for solving facility layout problems in CMS. Alfa's model
assumes that the location of the cells is predetermined, hence it only solves the intra-cell layout
problems. Das [12] also formulated a model for solving inter-cell layout problems. This model
doesn't consider intra-cell layout, however it does inuence the nal inter-cell layout. To date,
no researcher has demonstrated any model to solve both inter-cell and intra-cell facility layout
problems for CMS.
In this paper, we present a model that minimizes the total material handling distance on the
shop oor. This model solves both inter-cell and intra-cell facility layout problems in CMS sim-
ultaneously. We also present an improved simulated annealing algorithm that modies the gen-
eration mechanism of neighboring congurations to nd the solution. Then, the solution quality
(measured in total distance) and computational eciency (measured in CPU time) with
Compulsion simulated annealing algorithm [13] are compared. The rest of this paper is as fol-
lows. In Section 2, the formulation of the facility layout problem is presented. Section 3 reviews
the simulated annealing algorithm and presents the Improved simulated annealing algorithm.
Computational results and performance comparisons are given in Section 4. The conclusions of
this study are given in Section 5.
 Improved simulated annealing for facility layout problems 311

2. CMS FACILITY LAYOUT PROBLEM

In this section, we will formulate the model for the facility layout problem in CMS. The con-
cepts of the formulation are shown in Fig. 2, and the assumptions are described as follows:

1. The cell formation is completed rst, i.e. what kinds of machines belong to which cells is
known.
2. Each cell is laid out in a U-shape. The length and width of the U-shape is known. Besides,
material handling ows along the U-shape.
3. Workstations are regarded as cells.
4. The distance between any two neighboring machines in the same cell is equal. The distance
between any two neighboring cells is equal.
5. The loading and unloading point is at the center of each machine or workstation.
6. The loading point for the cell is at the entry point of the cell and the unloading point for the
cell is at the leaving point of the cell.
7. The shape and space of the shop oor is not restricted.

The variables and symbols used in the model are dened as follows:
c:total number of cells, including workstations
m:total number of machines in the system including workstations
MFij:material ow between machines i and j
NMC(p):the number of machines assigned to cell location p
Ei:the cell to which machine i is assigned

Xik 1; if machine i is assigned to machine location k
Xik:
Xik 0; otherwise

Ybp 1; if cell b is assigned to cell location p
Ybp:
Ybp 0; otherwise
DRikjl: the inter-cell material handling distance between machine i and j when machine i is assigned to machine location k and
machine j is assigned to machine location l
DAikjl: the intra-cell material handling distance between machine i and j when machine i is assigned to machine location k and
machine j is assigned to machine location l
Dikjl: total material handling distance between machine i and j, Dikjl=DRikjl+DAikjl

The facility layout problem for CMS is then formulated as follows:

X
c X
c X
m X
m X
m X
m
Minimize MFij Dikjl Xik Xjl YEi p YEj q 1
p1 q1 i1 j1 k1 l1

Fig. 2. The concepts of facility layout in CMS (for c = 4, m = 9).

312 Tai-Yue Wang et al.

X
m
subject to Xik 1 ; 8 k 1; 2; . . . ; m 2
i1

X
m
Xik 1 ; 8 i 1; 2; . . . ; m 3
k1

X
c
Ybp 1 ; 8 p 1; 2; . . . ; c 4
b1

X
c
Ybp 1 ; 8 b 1; 2; . . . ; c 5
p1

X
p1 X
c X
m
Ybr NMCb < kXik ; 8 i 1; 2; . . . ; m 6
r1 b1 k1

X
m p X
X c
kXik R Ybr NMCb ; 8 i 1; 2; . . . ; m 7
k1 r1 b1


1; if machine i is assigned to machine location k
Xik
0; otherwise

1; if cell b is assigned to cell location p
Ybp
0; otherwise

Objective function (1) minimizes the total material handling distance on the shop oor for this
system. Constraints (2) and (3) ensure that each machine location is assigned to one machine
and each machine is assigned to one machine location. Then constraints (4) and (5) ensure that
each cell location is assigned to one cell and each cell is assigned to one cell location. Lastly,
constraints (6) and (7), the zoning constraints, ensure that machines in the same cell Ei are
assigned to the same cell location. In other words, the kth machine location must be between
the total number of machines in the rst p 1 cells and the total number of machines in the
rst p cells.

3. SIMULATED ANNEALING

3.1. Traditional simulated annealing

Kirkpatrick et al. [14] introduced the concept of a simulated annealing algorithm in 1983. It is
an analogy between the physical annealing process of solids and the problem of solving large
combinatorial optimization problems. Solutions in a combinatorial problem are equivalent to
states of a physical system, and the cost of a solution is equivalent to the energy of a state [15].
In the searching process, the simulated annealing algorithm accepts not only better but also
worse neighboring solutions with a certain probability. This means that the simulated annealing
algorithm has the ability to escape from local minima. Therefore, it can nd high quality sol-
utions that do not strongly depend upon the choice of the initial solution compared to local
search algorithms. In other words, the algorithm is eective and robust. Furthermore, it has
been proven that the computation time of this algorithm has a polynomial upper bound [15].
The simulated annealing procedure includes four basic components [16]:
1. Congurations: all of the possible solutions for the combinatorial problem, i.e. the states.
2. Move set: a set of allowable transitions. These transitions must be able to reach all of the
congurations.
 Improved simulated annealing for facility layout problems 313

3. Cost function: a measure of how good any given conguration is.

4. Cooling schedule: to anneal the problem from random to a good, frozen solution.
If one wants to use the simulated annealing algorithm, the initial temperature, rules for decreas-
ing the value of the temperatures, the number of transitions at each value of temperature, and
when annealing should be stopped must rst be decided.
Then one can use Sridhar and Rajendran's [2] annealing procedure as follows to nd the sol-
ution:
Step 1. Generate an initial conguration S.
Step 2. Get an initial temperature T>0.
Step 3. While not yet satisfy the stop criterion.
Step 3.1 Perform the following loop L times.
Step 3.1.1 Pick a random neighbor S' of S.
Step 3.1.2 Let D = cost(S') cos t(S).
Step 3.1.3 If DR0 then set S = S'.
Step 3.1.4 If D>0 then set S = S' with probability exp(D/T).
Step 3.2 Set T = rT.
Step 4. Return S.

Step 3.1.1 is known as the generation mechanism of neighboring congurations. Generally,

the generation mechanism for facility layout problems without zoning constraints randomly
selects two machines and exchanges the location of the selected machines. Kouvelis et al. [13]
presented two dierent approaches for the presence of zoning constraints in the facility layout
problem. The rst approach is referred to as Compulsion simulated annealing. It takes the zon-
ing constraints into account when generating the initial and neighboring congurations. They
also modied the generation mechanism as follows [13]:

Step 3.1.1 Pick a random neighbor S' (randomly select two machines then exchange the location of the selected machines) of S. If S'
satises the zoning constraints, continue with Step 3.1.2. Otherwise, repeat Step 3.1.1.

The second approach is referred to as Penalty simulated annealing. Instead of using Lagrange
multipliers, the zoning constraints are taken into account in the cost function. It imposes high
penalty terms to each conguration that violates the constraints. This forces the algorithm to
choose congurations that satisfy the constraints most of the time. They concluded that the
Compulsion method outperforms the Penalty method with respect to solution quality as well as
computational eciency.

3.2. Cooling schedule

The cooling schedule of this paper is similar to Kouvelis et al. [13] except the stop criterion.
3.2.1. Initial temperature. In physical analogy, the initial temperature should be large enough
to heat up the solid until all particles are randomly arranged in the liquid phase. This means
that at the beginning of the annealing process, the transitions are able to reach all of the con-
gurations. By this property, the algorithm can nd a solution that does not strongly depend
upon the initial conguration. The initial temperature T0 can be determined by means of a cost-
increasing transition which would be accepted in the beginning of the annealing process with
probability P0. The mean cost increasing D of the cost-increasing transitions is then computed.
In the calculation, T0 is calculated as follows.

D
T0 1 8
lnP1
0

The number of transitions for calculating D is a fraction (SAMPLE) of the total number of
neighboring congurations. The total number of neighboring conguration is the order of m2.
3.2.2. Length of the Markov chains. The annealing process transfers from one conguration to
one of its neighbors with a certain probability, this is equivalent to a Markov chain. Thus, one
can consider each value of temperature as a Markov chain. In fact, the number of accepted
transitions are smaller with lower values of the temperature. Therefore, we should determine the
upper bound of the Markov chain length. The upper bound can be a proportion (LENPER-
CENT) of the total number of neighboring congurations.
314 Tai-Yue Wang et al.

3.2.3. Rules for decreasing the temperature. For a certain value of temperature, the tempera-
ture is reduced when the numbers of transitions reach the upper bound of the Markov chain
length. The control parameter, i.e. the reduction ratio of temperature, usually is chosen for
small temperature changes. The Markov chain more easily leads to an equilibrium state if the
temperature change is small. Hence, we use the decrement rule as follows.
Tk rTk1 k 1; 2; 3; . . . 9
The control parameter r (RATIO) is small but close to 1.
3.2.4. Stop criterion. The annealing process is terminated when the system is frozen, i.e. the
value of the cost function of the solution does not improve after a certain number of consecu-
tive Markov chains. In this paper, the annealing process is terminated if either of the following
two conditions is satised. (1) The process will stop if the number of accepted transitions is less
than a fraction (MINPERCENT) of the total number of attempted transitions. (2) The anneal-
ing process will also stop if the current best conguration remains unchanged for lnvYv number
of temperature reduction steps. Aarts and Korst [15] have proven that the upper bound of the
total number of temperature reduction steps (i.e. the number of Markov chains) is proportional
to lnvYv; Y is the solution space that denotes the nite set of all possible solutions. In our pro-
blem, Y is equivalent to the factorial of m. Most of the elements in Y, however, are infeasible
solution because there are too many zoning constraints, so we use lnvYv as the upper bound of
the number of Markov chains.

3.3. Improved simulated annealing algorithm

The facility layout problem in CMS shown in Section 2 is too complex to generate a neigh-
boring conguration that satises all of the zoning constraints. Thus the Compulsion method
becomes inecient, because it is easily trapped into the loop generating a neighboring congur-
ation, and spends a signicant proportion of time testing if the conguration is feasible (i.e. sol-
utions that satisfy all of the zoning constraints). To escape from the trap, we introduce a new
generation mechanism that can always generate a neighboring conguration which satises all
of the zoning constraints. The new generation mechanism is described below:
Step 3.1.1 Pick a random neighbor S' (randomly select two machines then exchange the location of the selected machines) of S. If S'
satises the zoning constraints, continue with Step 3.1.2. Otherwise, restore the original condition, exchange the location of the
cells that the selected machines belong to, replace S' with this new conguration, continue with Step 3.1.2.

The annealing procedure of the Improved simulated annealing is as shown in Fig. 3.

3.4. Parameter analysis

To nd the appropriate parameters for these two annealing procedures, we use the parameters
provided by Kouvelis et al. [13] at rst then change one parameter at a time. The value of par-
ameters provided by Kouvelis et al. are as follows: P0=0.4, SAMPLE = 0.08, RATIO = 0.99,
LENPERCENT = 0.95, MINPERCENT = 0.01. The problem size used to do the parameter
analysis is m = 8, c = 3. Ten replications with dierent random seed are run for each combi-
nation of parameters. We choose the value of the parameter that has the best average solution
quality. If a tie occurs, we choose the value with less average CPU time. The parameter analysis
results are shown in Tables 15. The asterisk (*) indicates the incumbent parameter for search-
ing the standard parameter set. The standard parameter set used for these two simulated anneal-
ing procedures are shown in Table 6.

4. COMPUTATIONAL RESULTS

The above two dierent simulated annealing procedures use the cooling schedule and par-
ameters in accordance with Section 3.2 and Table 6. These two procedures were programmed in
C language and ran on a PC with 100 MHz Pentium1 CPU. The test problems were randomly
generated with feasible cell dimension in mind. We ran each test problem ten times with dier-
ent random seeds. To provide the comparisons of solution quality, the optimal solutions of test
problems are found by enumeration except the problem m = 16, c = 6 (Table 7).
 Improved simulated annealing for facility layout problems 315

Fig. 3. The procedure of improved simulated annealing.

The computational results are shown in Table 8. The solution quality from either Compulsion
or Improved procedure is rather good. In each test problem, the best and average solution of
the ten runs is almost equal to the optimal solution. Even in the worst case (m = 14, c = 5), the
316 Tai-Yue Wang et al.

Table 1. Parameter P0
P0 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7

Compulsion procedure
AVG cost (m) 78746.25 78746.25* 78746.25 78906.25 79094.25 78906.25
AVG time (sec) 10.13 8.59 8.99 9.79 10.55 12.66
Improved procedure
AVG cost (m) 78746.25 78746.25 78826.25 78746.25* 79812.88 79072.88
AVG time (sec) 10.35 10.53 10.19 9.91 10.61 11.17

Table 2. Parameter SAMPLE

SAMPLE 0.04 0.08 0.12 0.16 0.20

Compulsion procedure
AVG cost (m) 78746.25 78746.25 78746.25 78746.25* 78746.25
AVG time (sec) 9.41 9.69 11.57 9.31 10.39
Improved procedure
AVG cost (m) 78826.25 78746.25 78746.25* 78906.25 79159.50
AVG time (sec) 10.10 10.62 10.01 10.32 10.56

Table 3. Parameter RATIO

RATIO 0.99 0.98 0.96 0.92 0.85

Compulsion procedure
AVG cost (m) 78826.25 78746.25 78826.25 78746.25 78746.25*
AVG time (sec) 11.13 9.40 9.32 10.16 9.16
Improved procedure
AVG cost (m) 79211.25 78906.25 78906.25 78746.25 78746.25*
AVG time (sec) 9.36 11.81 14.31 10.19 9.62

Table 4. Parameter LENPERCENT

LENPERCENT 1.00 0.95 0.90 0.85 0.80

Compulsion procedure
AVG cost (m) 78746.25 78746.25 78746.25 78746.25 78746.25*
AVG time (sec) 9.48 9.68 8.90 8.80 8.26
Improved procedure
AVG cost (m) 78746.25 78746.25* 78746.25 78746.25 78746.25
AVG time (sec) 9.63 9.17 9.88 9.98 10.25

Table 5. Parameter MINPERCENT

MINPERCENT 0.01 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5

Compulsion procedure
AVG cost (m) 78746.25 78746.25 78826.25 78746.25* 79639.25 79449.38
AVG time (sec) 8.49 8.32 7.21 6.48 3.35 3.21
Improved procedure
AVG cost (m) 78746.25 78746.25 78746.25 78746.25 78746.25* 80066.38
AVG time (sec) 10.46 8.52 8.64 9.30 7.76 4.04

Table 6. The standard parameter set used in this paper

Parameters Compulsion procedure Improved procedure

P0 0.30 0.40
RATIO 0.85 0.85
2
Total number of neighbors O(m )
Transitions for calculation D 0.16m2 0.12m2
UPPERLEN 0.80m2 0.95m2
MINPERCENT 0.30 0.40
TIME lnvm!v
 Improved simulated annealing for facility layout problems 317

Table 7. The optimal solution of test problems found out by enumeration

Number of machines and cells
m = 6, c = 2 m = 8, c = 3 m = 10, c = 4 m = 12, c = 5 m = 14, c = 5

Optimal (m) 19815.00 78746.25 75556.00 54880.50 168180.86

CPU time (sec) 0.60 20.38 904.73 11292.64 444403.13

Table 8. The solution quality of Compulsion and Improved procedure

Number of machines and cells
m = 6, c = 2 m = 8, c = 3 m = 10, c = 4 m = 12, c = 5 m = 14, c = 5 m = 16, c = 6

Compulsion
procedure
AVG cost (m) 19815.00 (0.00%) 78746.25 (0.00%) 75728.80 (0.23%) 55436.50 (1.01%) 171206.36 (1.80%) 130769.16
Best cost (m) 19815.00 (0.00%) 78746.25 (0.00%) 75556.00 (0.00%) 54880.50 (0.00%) 168180.86 (0.00%) 128092.50
Worst cost (m) 19815.00 (0.00%) 78746.25 (0.00%) 77284.00 (2.29%) 57960.50 (5.61%) 179050.84 (6.46%) 133064.17
Improved
procedure
AVG cost (m) 19815.00 (0.00%) 78826.25 (0.10%) 75614.80 (0.08%) 55887.50 (1.83%) 172143.36 (2.36%) 128486.46
Best cost (m) 19815.00 (0.00%) 78746.25 (0.00%) 75556.00 (0.00%) 54880.50 (0.00%) 168180.86 (0.00%) 125203.50
Worst cost (m) 19815.00 (0.00%) 79546.25 (1.02%) 76144.00 (0.78%) 57640.50 (4.79%) 176927.52 (5.20%) 132103.50

Table 9. Computation time of Compulsion and Improved procedure

Number of machines and cells
m = 6, c = 2 m = 8, c = 3 m = 10, c = 4 m = 12, c = 5 m = 14, c = 5 m = 16, c = 6

Compulsion
procedure
AVG CPU time 0.45 6.07 47.21 245.27 1274.08 8728.32
Best CPU time 0.38 2.03 26.54 179.73 864.29 5772.80
Worst CPU time 0.55 9.01 61.76 308.30 1623.57 12969.84
Improved
procedure
AVG CPU time 0.60 6.35 52.22 192.32 320.12 876.74
Best CPU time 0.44 3.35 38.13 88.35 170.82 835.27
Worst CPU time 0.82 11.15 65.66 230.88 476.62 1133.90

error is only around 6% compared to the optimal solution. The solution quality has no signi-
cant dierence in these two procedures. The results are depicted in Fig. 4.
Although there is no signicant dierence in solution quality, the dierence in computational
eciency is quite signicant. Table 9 shows the computational time for both procedures, and
Fig. 5 gives the graphical presentation. One can see that the computational eciency is about
the same when the problem size is small. The computation eciency of the Compulsion pro-
cedure, however deteriorates quickly when the problem size becomes large. One can explain the

Fig. 4. Comparison of solution quality between Compulsion and Improved procedure.

318 Tai-Yue Wang et al.

Fig. 5. Comparison of computation eciency between Compulsion and Improved peocedure.

results as follows: the Compulsion procedure, although it maintains a higher degree of random-
ness than the Improved procedure, is easily trapped into the loop generating a neighboring con-
guration and spends a signicant proportion of time testing if the conguration is feasible
when the problem size becomes large. The advantage of the Improved procedure is that it
always generates a neighboring conguration that satises all of the zoning constraints. Thus,
the Improved procedure will require less computational time than the Compulsion procedure as
the problem size increases.

5. CONCLUSION

In this research, we develop a model for facility layout problems for CMS. We also present
an Improved simulated annealing algorithm for the solution of this model. The computational
results show that the Improved simulated annealing algorithm can produce a solution as good
as the Compulsion simulated annealing algorithm, while having less randomness. Also the
Improved simulated annealing algorithm has very good computational eciency (i.e. requires
less CPU time) when the problem increases. This implies that the Improved simulated annealing
algorithm provides an opportunity to nd a better solution with the same time period than the
Compulsion simulated annealing algorithm. This goal is achieved because the Improved simu-
lated annealing algorithm can search longer Markov chain lengths or search a greater number
of times than the Compulsion simulated annealing algorithm. Thus, the Improved simulated
annealing algorithm will provide a new direction for other problems solved by simulated anneal-
ing algorithms.

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