Development of models and search heuristics for the design of cellular manufacturing system associating scheduling and cross flow

Abstract

The Cellular Manufacturing System (CMS) is a competitive newlinemanufacturing approach based on Group Technology (GT) concept of newlinegrouping parts and machines into cells so that material handling benefits newlinereduced Work-In-Progress (WIP) are achieved. The major challenges of the newlineCMS design are to address the needs of a practical CMS manufacturing newlineenvironment and derive an optimal decision so that CMS is effective and newlineefficient.The design of CMS involves various structural and operational newlinedecisions. The major structural decision parameters are: Number of cells; newlineGrouping of parts and machines into cells; Layout; and that of operational newlineare: Scheduling; Machine duplications and Alternate routings. The literature newlinereview on CMS decision parameters reveals that consideration of design newlineissues of optimal number of cells, and part-machine grouping with machine newlineduplications along with operational issues of scheduling, alternate routings or newlinecross-flow and dynamic environment considerations is limited in CMS design newlineliterature.On the above concerns, this research work formulates four CMS newlinedesign models associating scheduling and cross-flow with the scope of being newlineapplied to different manufacturing scenarios as follows. newline newline