Abstract
In the global industrial competition, layout design and planning is becoming more and more critical due to shorter product life cycles and highly dynamic demand conditions. In this context, traditional layouts such as product and process/functional layouts are considered inferior. Cellular layouts have been proposed as an alternative to these layouts but they need a complete reallocation of resources, which consumes time and money. Hence, it is necessary to verify the performance measures before the design and selection of a certain type of layout. In this context, this paper makes an attempt to study the suitability of a virtual cellular layout (VCL) along with an existing functional layout (FL) of an industry and a classical cellular layout (CL), if considered for implementation. A Genetic algorithm (GA) based intra-cell formation procedure is used in the cellular layout design. To identify the suitability of a particular layout in a given environment, a typical manufacturing system is modeled using the WITNESS 2006 simulation software. Design of experiments (DOE) is used to plan the simulation experiments. The performance of each of the three layouts is analyzed statistically by means of operational parameters such as machine utilization, throughput, average distance traveled by parts and average work-in-process. The results from the simulation experiments indicate that the performance of virtual cellular manufacturing falls between that of functional and cellular manufacturing. Also, we find that the performance of a virtual cellular layout is often relatively superior to that of a functional layout and marginally inferior to a cellular layout.
Highlights
In the global industrial environment, it is essential that manufacturing systems should be controlled optimally, to minimize manufacturing costs, to meet production schedules and to improve productivity
If the companies are interested in implementing manufacturing systems that can be quickly reconfigured with almost negligible equipment rearrangement costs, a virtual cellular manufacturing (VCM) system can be considered as a viable option
The throughput of the production line is increased by 36.47% in case of cellular layout and in case of virtual cellular layout an increase of 23.19% is achieved when compared with the existing process layout
Summary
In the global industrial environment, it is essential that manufacturing systems should be controlled optimally, to minimize manufacturing costs, to meet production schedules and to improve productivity. Kannan and Ghosh (1996) showed that the benefits of CMS can be improved by dedicating machines to part families on a temporary basis, and allowing cells to respond to changes in the existing shop conditions They stated that VCM is an alternative between the extremes of high flexibility/low set-up efficiency (process layout) and low flexibility/high set-up efficiency (cellular layout). In the design of cellular manufacturing systems, the goal is to partition machines into cells so that the travel distance of part is minimized. There is not much difference in distance traveled by parts in virtual cellular and process layouts. The average percentage machine utilization seems to be maximum for the combination of cellular layout, lot size of 4 and the scheduling rule FIFO. The comparison of performance measures of cellular and virtual cellular layouts with that of existing process layout in terms of percentage increase / decrease is shown in Table
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