Article ID: | iaor199572 |
Country: | United Kingdom |
Volume: | 32 |
Issue: | 5 |
Start Page Number: | 1197 |
End Page Number: | 1218 |
Publication Date: | May 1994 |
Journal: | International Journal of Production Research |
Authors: | Irani S.A., Arvindh B. |
Keywords: | cellular manufacturing |
Cellular manufacturing is a viable option in many manufacturing systems. There are various subproblems in the design of a cellular manufacturing system. These are machine group and part family formation, machine duplication, intracell layout and intercell layout. The only comprehensive design strategy that attempts to address all of these is production flow analysis. However, this technique is a sequential strategy where the subproblems mentioned above are assumed nested within each other and are solved in a forward pass with no feedback. This is a satisfactory approach only in cases where the part families are relatively disjoint and machine groups are formed without constraints on machine duplication to eliminate intercell flow. The presence of bottleneck machines and parts renders the problem considerably more complex, as the subproblems influence each other substantially. This paper presents an integrated framework for solving these subproblems by generating a limited set of feasible alternative solutions.