Scheduling problem in a cellular manufacturing environment is treated as group scheduling problem, which assumes that all parts in a part family are processed in the same cell and no inter-cellular transfer is needed. In a typical CMS environment, however, there could be some exceptional parts, which need to visit machines in the other cells. This fact limits the applicability of group scheduling approaches. These stages are termed as intra-cell scheduling and inter-cell scheduling. Through inter-cell scheduling, the sequence of parts within manufacturing cells is determined. In inter-cell scheduling however, the sequence of cells is obtained. This paper addresses the scheduling of manufacturing cells in which parts may need to visit different cells. A metaheuristic named Scatter Search and Simulated Annealing methods are proposed to solve the intra-cell and SVS-algorithm is to inter cell-scheduling problem. The performances of proposed algorithms are evaluated on benchmark problems selected from literature. The results reveal that the scatter search algorithm performs better than heuristic NEH method in the selected benchmark problems with respect to average makespan.

Keywords: Cell Scheduling, Metaheuristic, Scatter Search, and Makespan.