Group Technology: Manufacturing Cell Formation Incorporating Routing Flexibilities with Alternative Machines to Minimize the Material Handling Cost

Severe global competition and customer awareness of various products are forcing manufacturers to seek more efficiency, more flexibilities, and more timely deliveries at a low cost if at all possible. As one of the most important applications of group technology in production, cellular manufacturing was considered in this study with routing flexibilities and the alternative machines to minimize the overall material handling cost through the reduction of the inter-cell transportation and the intra-cell movements caused by the exceptional elements and the voids.;It is well known that the manufacturing cell formation of the part families and the machine cells is the core and the critical component of the cellular manufacturing systems. In this study, the part families and the machine cells are formed subsequently through the developed heuristic algorithms by employing the proposed new similarity coefficients between parts and between machines. A nonlinear mathematical model incorporating part-related production information and machine-related attributes is introduced as the prototype of initial problem objective formulation. A linear binary integer program is presented by introducing additional binary integer variables in order to achieve the optimal solution of minimizing the overall material handling cost. A C++ program was developed to implement the proposed manufacturing cell formation methodology and strategy. The developed C++ program iteratively searches for the best solution with respect to the part processing sequence, the part processing time, the part demand, the number of operations of each part, the machine capacity, and the machine failure rate. Experimental results indicate that the proposed methodology is capable of yielding a significant reduction in material handling cost which is affected through numerous production-related factors.;In summary, the proposed manufacturing cell formation technique and strategy has proved to be ambitious in solving cell formation problems with routing flexibility and alternative machines in order to minimize the overall material handling cost in cellular manufacturing systems.