Manufacturing system cell formation and evaluation using a new inter-cell flow reduction heuristic

Abstract

The initial stage in the implementation of cellular manufacturing involves the determination of part families and machine cell (PF/MC). We developed a new heuristic for PF/MC formation that provides a variety of PF/MC alternatives. In addition, we developed a simulation model of a group technology (GT) system using the new heuristic and compared this to that of a traditional process layout (TPL) system. We used performance criteria such as: machine utilization, queue length, flow time, etc. The simulation experiment included a TPL shop, an original GT shop, and an alternative GT shop, each with different part demand distributions.