  Developing a group of machine cells and their corresponding part families to
minimize the inter-cell and intra-cell material flow is the basic objective of
the designing of a cellular manufacturing system (CMS). Afterwards achieving a
competent cell layout is essential in order to minimize the total inter-cell
part travels, which is principally noteworthy. There are plentiful articles of
CMS literature which considered cell formation problems; however cell layout
topic has rarely been addressed. Therefore this research is intended to focus
on an adapted mathematical model of the layout design problem considering
material handling cost and closeness ratings of manufacturing cells. Owing to
the combinatorial class of the said problem, an efficient NP-hard technique
based on Simulated Annealing metaheuristic is proposed henceforth. Some test
problems are solved using the proposed technique. Computational results show
that the proposed metaheuristic approach is extremely effective and efficient
in terms of solution quality and computational complexity.
