The sustainable cell formation problem: manufacturing cell creation with machine modification costs

An approach for manufacturing cell formation with machine modification is presented. In cell formation it is often important in practice to be able to reassign parts to additional machine types in order to create better cell configurations. This involves extending the set of parts that certain individual machines can process. Such extensions may be cheaper than simply purchasing additional machines. Thus, there is the possibility of machine modification to reduce inter-cell travel. The cost of such modifications must be balanced by the consequent reduction in inter-cell travel cost. The extended machine cell formation problem to be described involves the specification of which individual machines should be modified to enable them to process additional part types, part–machine assignment, and the grouping of individual machines for cell formation. The objective is to minimize the sum of the machine modification costs and the inter-cell travel. We call this the sustainable cell formation problem (SCFP). As far as the authors are aware, there have not been any solution procedures for this important problem reported in the open literature. It is our purpose to fill this gap by presenting a mixed integer programming model of the SCFP. We also propose and analyze greedy and tabu search heuristics for the design of large-scale systems related to the SCFP. Computational experience with the solution procedures indicates that they are likely to be useful additions to the production engineer's toolkit.