An integrated approach to cell formation and part routing in Group Technology Manufacturing Systems

In this paper the authors develop two mathematical models to capture the complexity of two important planning problems in Group Technology (GT) Manufacturing Systems, namely, cell formation and part routing selection. Research published so far treats the two problems independently in a hierarchical manner. The authors treat them as two equally important decisions and develop a 0-1 integer programming formulation to select part routing and to form cells based on total system cost defined as the sum of processing costs and annualized machine operating costs. Subsequently, they modify the formulation to form cells in order to maximize the routing flexibility of the system.