Abstract
In an environment with fluctuating demand and unpredictable parts mix compositions, the efficiency of cellular systems necessitates the use of virtual cells. Virtual cellular manufacturing systems (VCMSs) are based on a highly flexible manufacturing concept designed to improve the performance of classical cellular manufacturing systems (CMSs) and job shop manufacturing environment by creating virtual grouping the resources temporarily in the production planning and control system. The underlying concept is particularly valuable during high demands variety and variability and with increase in machines types required by parts for processing. Whereas researches on VCMSs are still in a preliminary stage, this concept has gained momentum during the last decade and a wide and diverse variety of solution techniques have been applied for solving part-machine cell formation problems in these systems. The aim of this paper is to provide a review on recent efforts and developments in the VCMSs area to make required comparisons among the published works and determine future research issues and high-impact research scopes to search more. In this study, the overview was on various criteria in detail. While already a few researchers tended to make surveys over VCMSs, some important criteria were neglected to review and consider, which this paper tried to cover them as a complementary and an updated version. Key words: Cell formation, survey, virtual cellular manufacturing system.
Highlights
In the today’s competitive market, manufacturers require well-designed layouts to improve their operations and reduce manufacturing costs
The functional layout is more robust regarding the changes in the products mix and offers a certain routing flexibility, which may improve shop performance but significantly increases the production costs because of long set-up times
In modern manufacturing systems such as agile and flexible manufacturing systems, there is an increasing demand for customized products, which are produced in smaller lot sizes than before
Summary
In the today’s competitive market, manufacturers require well-designed layouts to improve their operations and reduce manufacturing costs. The VCMS is a new and powerful concept including a temporarily grouping of machines, jobs and workers which instead of a physical re-allocation of machines, as in classical and dynamic CMS, aims to reduce set-up times, material handling times, and lead times by grouping similar jobs in the production planning and control. Flow time performance of the shop may be improved Distinguishing such groups in the production control system offers the possibility of achieving the advantages of CMSs in non-cellular manufacturing systems. One way of achieving good responsiveness and reconfigurability in Agile Manufacturing (AM) is by creating virtual cells in which resources can be dynamically configured and reconfigured usually without having to physically rearrange the facility layout in response to changes in products demand and variety (Fung et al, 2008). Virtual cell formation provides a manufacturing environment, which is flexible, adaptive, and reconfigurable without considerable effort, with the support of a computerized system (Babu et al, 2000)
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