An efficiency frontier approach for the design of cellular manufacturing systems in a lumpy demand environment

A new multi-objective approach for the cell formation problem in a lumpy demand environment is presented. The objectives addressed in this paper are grouping efficiency and capacity requirements. In lumpy demand the required capacity is affected by demand variability and the correlation between the part types assigned to the cells. We claim that since the required capacity is determined by part types grouping, part type demands variability and their correlation should be taken into consideration as part of the cell formation. This new approach is discussed and formulated as a mixed integer programming model and illustrated by a wide range of typical examples. These examples demonstrate that when using traditional approaches designers do not obtain optimal solutions and may make decisions on the basis of wrong results. The proposed approach helps designers eliminate these problems and produce a reasonable cell design. A genetic algorithm is proposed and examined for designing large-scale systems.