A set partitioning based heuristic procedure for incremental cell formation with routing flexibility

One of the important issues regarding the implementation of cellular manufacturing relates to deciding whether to convert an existing job shop into a cellular manufacturing system comprehensively in a single go, or to convert in stages incrementally wherein the cells are formed one after the other taking the advantage of experiences of implementation. In this paper, a heuristic method based on iterative set partitioning is proposed for incremental cell formation where part operations can be processed on alternative machines. The objective is to minimize cycle time for a given number of workstations. The proposed method is numerically compared with the existing branch and bound technique and another heuristic algorithm based on multistage programming. It is found that the proposed method requires significantly less computational efforts to yield the optimal solution.