Material handling device selection in cellular manufacturing

This paper presents a new multi-criteria decision model for the material handling device (MHD) selection problem in cellular manufacturing systems. Given a set of manufacturing cells based on several automatic work-centres, the technique makes it possible to select a particular MHD for each cell in an integrated way, with different constraints being taken into consideration. The approach is based on two different multi-attribute analyses executed with analytic hierarchy process (AHP) methodology, and a final integer linear programming including important limitations faced by the designer when making MHD investment decisions. An example using real data is provided to illustrate this methodology.