A dynamic programming approach to GA-based heuristic for multi-period CF problems

•Multi-period cell formation (CF) LIP model.•Computationally more challenging than the most comprehensive CF models in the literature.•A novel dynamic programming (DP) enhanced GA-heuristic developed to solve the multi-period problem.•Illustrative example has been provided that clarifies the application of DP-enhanced heuristic.•Performance evaluated against LINGO and multi period regular GA-based heuristic.

In this paper we have introduced a multi-period cell formation (CF) model which is more computationally challenging than the most comprehensive CF models in the literature. A dynamic programming (DP) based approach coupled with GA-based heuristic is proposed to solve the multi-period problem. Since, the introduced dynamic programming is general and can be applied to any GA-based heuristic with full rejuvenation cycles to solve the multi-period part of the model, we focused only on the DP approach in this paper but have explained the interface with the GA-based heuristic. Illustrative example has been provided that clarifies the application of DP-heuristic. The performance of the DP-heuristic has been evaluated against LINGO and multi period GA-based heuristic.