Cell Formation In Cellular Manufacturing System Research Articles

Cell formation configuration using interval type-2 fuzzy interactional interests among workers

Group working has an important role in cellular manufacturing systems (CMS) as they can affect the work environment and job executions on machines. The most important factors affecting human resources are aspects of ability and interactional interest among workers in workshops. Here, we present a simple and efficient method considering these two aspects to deal with the assignment of workers to cells. We use interval type-2 fuzzy interactional interest among workers and the capability of working on machines to develop a new concept of cell formation in CMS. By using a multidepot multiple travelling salesman problem (MDmTSP) model, we assign workers to cells and then propose a mathematical model to assign machine to cells.

An ant colony algorithm for cell-formation in cellular manufacturing systems

In this paper, we consider the problem of cell-formation in cellular manufacturing systems with the objective of maximising the grouping efficacy. We propose an Ant-Colony Optimisation (ACO) algorithm to obtain machine-cells and part-families. The Proposed ACO (PACO) algorithm is tested by using many benchmark data sets. The grouping efficacy obtained by the PACO algorithm for a given benchmark problem instance is compared with the grouping efficacies obtained by the existing approaches. The comparison shows that the PACO performs very well in maximising the grouping efficacy. [Received: 2 May 2007; Revised: 1 November 2007; Accepted: 3 December 2007]