The reconfiguration issue of stochastic facility layout design in cellular manufacturing systems

Facility layout is one of the important stages in the design of cellular manufacturing systems. It concerns with the arrangement of facilities within the machine cells and the machine cells in the shop floor in such a way that provides an efficient layout. Globalisation and consequences of its high competition which have challenged the manufacturers by providing uncertain situations in the manufacturing environments, degrades the performance of the manufacturing systems. In this study, the effects of uncertainty in demand of products on the layout of facilities in a cellular manufacturing system have been investigated. For this purpose, a stochastic facility layout model has been proposed that minimises the total material handling cost (both inter‐cell and intra‐cell), and considers that demand has a normal distribution function. The model has been made more practical by considering the transfer batch size of products and operation sequence of parts. To validate the model, several cases have been demonstrated, and solved by two methods; an optimisation software named Lingo 12.0, and an enumeration method which has been developed in C/C++. The results show that fluctuation in demand scenario (service level) can lead to change in the layout of facilities. In other words, the results show the sensitivity of layout problems in cellular manufacturing systems to variation in demand.