Dynamic control of a cellular-line production system under variations in the product mix

The present paper proposes a methodology for designing and controlling a cellular-line system, aiming at a drastic reduction in production lead times for large-scale manufacturing shops having reentrant product flows. The cellular-line system consists of a number of flow shops which are individual sets of different facilities and production lots circulate from shop to shop for processing. We formulated the designing and controlling problems of cellular-line systems and solved them using a genetic algorithm. A series of numerical experiments based on real-life data was performed under the condition assuming that the product mix varies and the results are shown to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology.