Forming GT cells incrementally using GRASP

Most research in cell design assumes that the entire plant is converted into group technology cells at once. However, empirical findings in recent papers suggest otherwise, that is, most industries have converted only part of the plant into manufacturing cells and most cells in industries are created and implemented sequentially over time. In this paper, we develop a mathematical model and a heuristic approach based on greedy random adaptive search procedures (GRASP) to address incremental cell formation problem. The methodology allows forming cells gradually and converting a fraction of the plant into cells.