Integrating design and planning considerations in cellular manufacturing

This paper presents a new model that integrates design and planning to prescribe a cost-effective cellular configuration that is responsive to real-world considerations. The model incorporates practical engineering features such as the finite capacity of machines, use of alternative machines, multiple ‘copies’ of a machine type, and limitations on cell size. It integrates design decisions, locating machines in each cell and identifying product families, with planning considerations, ensuring that machine capacities are sufficient to produce required volumes and dealing with between-cell movement to use alternative machines. Computational experience using a commercially available optimization package demonstrates that run time required to resolve problems of realistic size and scope can be quite reasonable.