Minimizing total tardiness subject to manpower restriction in labor‐intensive manufacturing cells

This paper focuses on two major issues in cellular manufacturing, namely manpower allocation and cell loading. Although significant work has been done in both of these fields, research to minimize the Total Tardiness (TT) within a multi‐cell environment has been limited. The methodology adopted in this paper is a two‐step one. First, manpower allocation for operations within a cell is determined using mathematical models. This step also includes variations of the mathematical model for sharing of operators between operations and sharing of operators with restrictions. The models with little or no restrictions have found to yield a higher production rate than the model with no operator sharing allowed. The next step involves a mathematical model for cell loading. The performance measure examined in this phase is the total tardiness subject to total Crew Size restriction. The total tardiness is reduced as the total crew size increases. However, it was also found that selection of alternative cell configurations affect the results as well total crew size.