Manufacturing cells design with flexible routing capability in presence of unreliable machines

Flexible manufacturing systems generally provide the possibility to use different process plans to manufacture a part owing to versatile machines. In this context, the design of manufacturing cells includes two problems, the constitution of the cells of machines and the assignment of the process plans to be used by the parts. Flexible routings allow the machines usage factor and the throughput time to be improved. The manager of such a system can also change the process plans to bypass unusable machines. The design of robust cell configurations which can accommodate different process plans assignment is an important issue. This paper proposes a new approach for designing manufacturing cells when the process plans can be changed because of machine breakdowns. The impact of our method is illustrated through a small example.