An application of analytic network process for the selection of cellular manufacturing systems

The ongoing research in the field of cellular manufacturing systems (CMS) is progressing on diverse fronts such as dynamic CMS, virtual CMS, etc. However, the following fundamental issues ‐ 'how an operations manager in an organisation would make a decision of choosing/selecting CMS, when he/she is confronted with different alternatives?', 'how would the manager make a decision, if the decision factors/criteria/attributes (for the sake of simplicity, it will be called as 'elements') are inter‐related?' are not given adequate importance. To address the above‐mentioned issues, a hypothetical case study is utilised to demonstrate how the managers' can make such a strategic decision using the analytic network process (ANP), one of the recently developed multi‐criteria decision‐making (MCDM) models that has the capability to model the relationships that exist within and between different categories comprising of various decision elements. The results obtained revealed that CMS is a better alternative under the given case situation.