Group technology cell formation considering operation sequences and production volumes

In this paper a new approach for minimizing intercell part flows in cellular manufacturing is proposed. Two types of production data-based part-machine incidence matrices (PMIMs) are developed to reflect the real-field data such as the operation sequences and production volumes of the parts to be manufactured. The type I production data-based PMIM represents the actual flows to or from machines by parts. A 0–1 linear formulation using the type I production data-based PMIM is developed to minimize the total intercell flows. Once the type I production data-based PMIM is obtained, a type II production data-based PMIM is constructed to reflect the actual intercell flows by bottleneck parts requiring operations outside its corresponding cell. Computational results with the well known data sets in literature show that the proposed production data-based PMIMs can be used as the fundamental replacements over the classical binary PMIM in the cell formation problem, and the mathematical model based on the new PMIMs reflecting the real-field data can be applied effectively to proper medium-sized cell formation problems.