Design an incremental cell formation problem considering human factor

Over the past three decades, plenty of techniques have been developed to solve cell formation problems. However, most researchers focus on forming cells in a single run or non-incrementally without considering implementation, planning and capital investment issues. This paper proposes a mixed-integer goal programming model to deal with incremental cell formation problem, in which human factor is involved trying to minimize total material handling cost, operation time of workers and salary cost. Furthermore, an improved cooperative particle swarm optimization is developed to solve the model. At last, a simple experiment is given and it proves that the model and the proposed algorithm are effective.