A Novel Modeling Approach for Solving the Cell Formation Problem

This paper presents a new modeling approach called Progressive Modeling (PM) and demonstrates it by solving the Cell Formation Problem (CFP). In this paper, the Progressive Modeling (PM), a component-based optimization technique, is used to solve the cell formation problem (CFP). This novel solution algorithm is utilized to find optimal or near-optimal solutions. A user-friendly Windows application is presented to capture the problem data, demonstrate the solution process, and display the results. A benchmark problem in the literature is solved and presented in this paper. The paper concludes by demonstrating the efficiency of the new modeling approach and its future extension.