Evaluation of manufacturing cell loading rules for independent cells

In this paper, first the growing importance of cellular manufacturing is mentioned and then cell loading and cell scheduling tasks are defined. Most of the work reported in the cellular control area assumes the presence of a single cell and therefore focuses on cell scheduling only. However, this study considers a multicell environment where cell loading becomes crucial for controlling the entire system. New rules for cell loading are introduced, several possible combinations are presented, and two algorithms used for cell loading are also described. Next the characteristics of a real manufacturing setting, where the experimentation has been carried out, are described in detail. In this system, products in each family can be assigned to more than one cell and also each cell can handle more than one family, thus creating overlapping among cells. Experimentation includes five cells, 120 products and four 6-month periods. The cells are considered as independent cells, i.e. products are completed within a cell. The results of the experimentation showed that no single rule dominated others in terms of all performance measures considered. However, a few rules produced similar results with respect to the numbers of tardy jobs, total tardiness and maximum tardiness, whereas the recommended rules were quite different when cell utilization was considered.