A comparison of competitive neural network with other al techniques in manufacturing cell formation

Abstract

The cell formation (CF) problem aims to transform the incidence matrix into block diagonal form. Numerous techniques are developed for this purpose ranging from mathematical programming to heuristic and AI techniques. In this study a simple but effective competitive neural network algorithm (CNN) is applied and compared with genetic algorithms, tabu search, simulated annealing and ant systems by making use of some well known data sets from literature. As a result at 14 out of 15 cases, better results are obtained by CNN.