MACHINES RELIABILITY CONSIDERATION IN THE GENERALIZED GROUP TECHNOLOGY PROBLEM

Abstract

ABSTRACT Cell formation is an important problem in the design of cellular manufacturing systems. Most cell formation methods appeared in the literature assume that each part has one process plan and all machines are 100% reliable. However, this is not realistic in the manufacturing systems. Considering parts alternative process routings and machines reliability together can help in realistic selection of process routings for parts. Also, considering these factors in addition to operations sequence and production volumes makes the problem more realistic. These factors are rarely considered all together in the machine cell formation problem in the literature. Also, most of the methods appeared in the literature used mathematical programming procedures. These procedures usually take large amount of computational efforts to solve the problem when classical optimization methods are used, especially for large-sized problems. Procedures using the similarity coefficient method are more flexible in incorporating various important production data. A new procedure that is based on the Similarity Coefficient Method is developed for solving the machine cell formation problem considering all the above mentioned important production factors. Keywords Group Technology; machine cell formation; similarity coefficient method