Article history: Received 1 April 2010 Received in revised form 22 July 2010 Accepted 30 July 2010 Available online 1 Auguest 2010 Meta-heuristic approaches are general algorithmic framework, often nature-inspired and designed to solve NP-complete optimization problems in cellular manufacturing systems and has been a growing research area for the past two decades. This paper discusses various metaheuristic techniques such as evolutionary approach, Ant colony optimization, simulated annealing, Tabu search and other recent approaches, and their applications to the vicinity of group technology/cell formation (GT/CF) problem in cellular manufacturing. The nobility of this paper is to incorporate various prevailing issues, open problems of meta-heuristic approaches, its usage, comparison, hybridization and its scope of future research in the aforesaid area. © 2010 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

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Application of Soft Computing Techniques for Cell Formation Considering Operational Time and Sequence