The essence of proposed heuristic procedure is to minimize the inter-cellular movement time or cost Open image in new window Fig. 1 Flow chart for proposed cell formation heuristic procedure.
The objective is to build manufacturing clusters by associating part families with machine cells, with the aim of minimizing the inter-cellular movements of parts by grouping efficacy measures.
The objective functions of their model are minimizing the purchase cost of machines, intra-cellular movements and the inter-cellular movement costs of materials while minimizing the total repair time for failed machines.
The essence of CF approaches is to eliminate/minimize the inter-cellular movement cost of parts (Arkat and Farahani 2012; Kumar and Sharma 2014; Lian et al. 2013; Selim et al. 1998).
The fixed point iteration method is employed to iteratively calculate the inter-cellular handoff rate as explained in [40].
The inter-cellular medium is simulated by a Monte-Carlo simulation on a 2d square lattice.
The inter-cellular simulation follows the diffusion of interferon molecules in the medium, which is described by the diffusion equation.
Another aspect of synchronizing the inter-cellular Monte-Carlo simulation with the intra-cellular Gillespie simulations involves the secretion of interferon molecules from each cell.
To include this in the simulation we added two parameters to the Monte-Carlo simulation of the inter-cellular medium.
