Some design issues in cellular manufacturing using the fuzzy programming approach

Fuzzy programming models are presented in this paper for the design of cellular manufacturing systems (CMS) at the post-clustering stage. Various strategies to deal with exceptional elements and bottleneck machines have been considered. The models are designed to handle linguistic vagueness in the estimates of system parameters. A multi-objective formulation is also presented to handle informational vagueness. Two problems are selected from literature to illustrate the models. The multi-objective fuzzy model is compared with an equivalent goal-programming formulation. The results indicate that the strategy to deal with subcontracting of exceptional parts, and duplication of bottleneck machines may be quite different as compared to deterministic models, if the vagueness in situational-parameters is captured. The models are effective in handling uncertainty in design parameters and are therefore expected to provide a more realistic CMS design.