Formation and dynamic routing of part families among flexible manufacturing cells

Very little research has focused on dynamic routing of part families among flexible manufacturing cells, and most of this work has considered part-family formation and routeing as two unrelated decisions. This paper proposed a dynamic routing method using a fuzzy part-family formation method combined with a certainty factor procedure to suggest the favourable route in a multicell flexible manufacturing system. Computational simulations show that the proposed dynamic routeing method that seeks to balance workload in a multicell flexible manufacturing system is more effective than the fixed routing mehtod in reducing mean flowtime, mean tardiness, and mean absolute lateness, in an environment characterized by high system utilization (85% or higher) and under a variety of demand patterns.