Robotic manufacturing cells are now used extensively in manufacturing systems in order toease the operations and replace humans with robots in hard and dangerous working conditions. Sincethe machines used in these manufacturing systems are CNC machines, their application entails muchexpenses. Moreover, their being idle during manufacturing operation is not beneficial. Therefore, inthis article the problem of optimal assignment of necessary operations to manufacture parts in 3- machine robotic manufacturing cells is considered. So, inspired by 3-partition problem, a mathematicalmodel based on Travelling Salesman Problem is presented for modeling the problem. Moreover, forsolving the presented model, along with the exact solution approach two metaheuristic methods namedgenetic and simulated annealing algorithms are also presented; several problems are solved using these approaches and their results are compared.
