Redesigning jobshops to cellular manufacturing systems

Abstract

Grouping parts into families which can be produced by a cluster of machine cells is the cornerstone of cellular manufacturing, which in turn is the building block for flexible manufacturing systems. Cellular manufacturing is a group technology (GT) concept that has recently attracted the attention of manufacturing firms operating in a jobshop environment to consider redesigning their manufacturing systems so as to take advantage of increased throughput, and reductions in work‐in‐progress, set‐up time, and lead times; leading to product quality and customer satisfaction. Presents a similarity order clustering technique for the machine cell formation problem. The procedure is compared with many existing procedures using eight well‐known problems from the literature. The results show that the proposed procedure, which is attractive due to its simplicity, compares well with existing procedures and should be useful to practitioners and researchers.