Loading policies in cellular manufacturing systems with remainder cell

Abstract

Cellular manufacturing systems (CMSs) are used when both production volume and product variety are at medium level. The fluctuations of volume and mix can reduce drastically the performance of classical CMSs. Therefore, several configurations have been proposed in literature as virtual manufacturing cells, fractal cells and remainder cells. This article investigates the cell-loading approaches in a manufacturing system composed of dedicated cells and a remainder cell. The remainder cell consists of machines that are able to manufacture all part families. The loading decision concerns the allocation of the parts to the remainder cell, instead of the dedicated cell. A simulation environment based on Rockwell Arena® has been developed to test the proposed approaches. The performance measures are evaluated in a very dynamic environment characterised by volume oscillations, mix fluctuations and machine failures. A classical CMS is used as a benchmark for the performance measures analysed. The simulation results show that the proposed policies lead to a better performance when market fluctuations occur.