Cell Formation Heuristic Procedure Considering Production Data

Abstract

Manufacturing cell formation is one of foremost, and critical aspect of any manufacturing cell design problem. A large number of cell formation methods are developed and research in this area is still in progress. In this paper an attempt has been made by authors to develop a simple, easy to understand and implement cell formation heuristic, having the capability to handle production data viz. operation sequence, production volume, and inter-cell movement cost simultaneously. The results obtained from proposed method are in tune with some highly complex methods, which validates the performance of proposed procedure. To demonstrate its ability to handle other production parameters with little modifications, a modification for consideration to part processing cost in addition to above mentioned production data is developed and explained. Towards the end the procedure to handle alternate process plans in conjugation with production data by the proposed cell formation procedure is also discussed.

Development of a cell formation heuristic by considering realistic data using principal component analysis and Taguchi’s method

“…Ideally manufacturing cell is to be formed in such a fashion that each manufacturing cell should act as an independent manufacturing unit. The essence of CF approaches is to eliminate/minimize the inter-cellular movement cost of parts (Arkat and Farahani 2012;Kumar and Sharma 2014;Lian et al 2013;Selim et al 1998). It can simply be achieved by duplicating the machines but duplication of machine involves large capital investment which ultimately adds to the product cost.…”

“…A large number of cell CF approaches have been developed so far, majority of them do not consider production-related data (Boutsinas 2013;Won and Lee 2001). Susanto et al (2009) revealed that 80 % of manufacturing CF approaches are focussed on the arrangement of binary part-machine incidence matrix, whereas more realistic and effective approaches could be developed by considering the various manufacturing flexibility and production-related data (Kumar and Sharma 2014). A little work is observed on CF considering any such data in a simple manner and some of them are summarised in Table 1, whilst on the other hand a large number of literature is available on binary matrix-based cell formation techniques.…”

“…Cell formation (CF), group layout (GL) and group scheduling (GS) are the three major steps in cellular manufacturing (Fardis et al 2013;Kia et al 2013). Amongst these, CF is the foremost (Doulabi et al 2009;Kumar and Sharma 2014) and key step (Krushinsky and Goldengorin 2012) in any cellular manufacturing problem. Cell formation deals with the identification of the part families with similar process requirements and allocating them to the machine cells for processing (Boutsinas 2013;Fardis et al 2013;Kumar and Sharma 2014;Sarker 1996).…”

“…Therefore, a manufacturing CF approach should provide an optimisation amongst these, without much complexity in approach. The cell formation approaches developed so far can be categorised as (Boutsinas 2013;Lian et al 2013;Papaioannou and Wilson 2010;Kumar and Sharma 2014;Yasuda et al 2005;Yin and Yasuda 2006) (i) Similarity coefficient-based methods (ii) Mathematical programmingbased methods (iii) Artificial intelligence-based approaches (iv) Heuristics/meta-heuristics/hybrid meta-heuristics, (v) Any combination of these. Amongst CF techniques similarity coefficient-based methods are more flexible and easy to implement (Yin and Yasuda 2006).…”

“…Amongst these, CF is the foremost (Doulabi et al 2009;Kumar and Sharma 2014) and key step (Krushinsky and Goldengorin 2012) in any cellular manufacturing problem. Cell formation deals with the identification of the part families with similar process requirements and allocating them to the machine cells for processing (Boutsinas 2013;Fardis et al 2013;Kumar and Sharma 2014;Sarker 1996). Ideally manufacturing cell is to be formed in such a fashion that each manufacturing cell should act as an independent manufacturing unit.…”