The economic cell number

Abstract

The economic benefits brought by the cellular manufacturing have been reported. Cell formation is one of the most important problems in the design of a cellular manufacturing. In cell formation problems, the number of cells is a critical factor. However, it is impossible to know the number of cells before solving the cell formation problem. In fact, determining the correct number of cells in a cellular manufacturing system is still an unresolved problem. We introduce a mathematical model in this paper to find the economic number of cells (we call it “Economic Cell Number”, ECN) that minimizes the total sum of intracell and intercell movements costs without solving the cell formation problem. A numerical example is used to verify the effectiveness of the proposed ECN. Although the proposed simple model still cannot deal with many realistic cell formation problems, it plays as a first attempt to find the economic number of cells.