Optimization analysis of flexible cellular manufacturing: Route selection and determining the optimal production conditions for ordered products

This paper describes a procedure for optimizing the route selection and production conditions considering alternate process plans in a cellular manufacturing environment. The type of production is mainly production-to-order which deals with the unexpected products resulting from changing environmental conditions. Flexible cellular manufacturing can be viewed as a complete unification of both flexible manufacturing process and flexible production management. The integrated problem for designing flexible cellular manufacturing associated with determining the optimal values of the machining speeds, overtime, and intercell flow is formulated as a Nonlinear Mixed Integer Programming (NMIP) problem in order to minimize the total incremental production cost. This is achieved by introducing marginal cost analysis into the NMIP, to obtain machining speed, overtime, intercell flow, and routing. The appliction of this procedure offers greater flexibility to take advantage of cellular manufacturing due to optimum use of resources. A solution procedure for this problem was developed and a numerical example is included.