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A Unified Approach for Designing a Cellular Manufacturing System by Specifying Number of Cells

A. M. Mukattash, K. K. Tahboub, R. H. Fouad, A. A. Al-Bashir

Abstract


Cellular manufacturing has received increasing attention during the past years. The main problem in designing cellular manufacturing systems is cell formation, in other words; grouping parts with similar processing requirements into part families and their relevant machines into machine cells. In the process of forming such manufacturing cells, the designer is faced with the constraint of limited number of cells, therefore the designer needs to specify the number of cells in the design in advance. A number of heuristic methods were developed in the literature to come up with acceptable but not optimal results due to the complexity of these optimization problems. The high performance of computers can be utilized to come up with exact solutions for small batch manufacturing where the number of machines is no more than ten machines. The main objective of this paper is to develop an approach that not only specifies the number of cells in advance but also determines all the possible ways to form p-cells from n-machines. The evolved algorithm will lead to a minimum number of voids and exceptional elements in cells in grouping machines and parts will dedicated for cellular manufacturing.

Keywords


Cellular Manufacturing systems, Cell Formation, Minimum Number of Voids and Exceptions and optimal Solution.

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