Abstract
This paper addresses the permutation flowline manufacturing cell with sequence dependent family setup times problem with the objective to minimize the makespan criterion. We develop a cooperative approach including a genetic algorithm and a branch and bound procedure. The latter is probabilistically integrated in the genetic algorithm in order to enhance the current solution. Moreover, the application of the branch and bound algorithm is based upon the decomposition of the problem into subproblems. The performance of the proposed method is tested by numerical experiments on a large number of representative problems.