Design of flexible manufacturing cell considering uncertain product mix requirement

Abstract

In the real-world manufacturing, the requirement of number and the attribute of product may not be known exactly at the time of designing the manufacturing cell. The design of manufacturing cell requires to identify machine groups and part families in Cellular Manufacturing (CM) system. The success of a CA system is sensitive to fluctuations in the demand for products and the product mix. A large number of papers on manufacturing cell design have been published so far, but very few of them have considered random product mix constraint at the design stage. Little work has been reported which incorporated real-life production parameters like operation sequence, production volume, batch size, material handling capacity, processing time, setup time, machine capacity and cost factors. Considerations of these important parameters make the cell formation problem more complex, but realistic. This paper presents a new formulation of the part family/machine cell formation problem that addresses the dynamic nature of the production environment by considering a multiperiod forecast of product mix and demand during the formation of part families and machine cells. The computational procedure of the algorithm has been illustrated by an example. Numerical results indicate that the proposed methodology is flexible, efficient and may be effective even for industrial problems.