Some comments on Malakooti et al. ‘Integrated group technology, cell formation, process planning, and production planning with application to the emergency room’

In this technical note, we suggest an alternative to the cellular layout for the emergency room problem discussed in Malakooti et al. The alternative layout – hybrid flowshop layout – belongs to a class of hybrid cellular layouts that can be designed using the integrated suite of algorithms available in the production flow analysis and simplification toolkit software. These layouts are intermediate between the traditional layout extremes – process layout and cellular layout – for a high-variety low-volume manufacturing facility. Our results indicate that the hybrid flowshop layout is superior to the cellular layout since it eliminates/reduces the duplication of procedures, backtrack flows between non-adjacent procedures and by-pass flows between procedures.