Manufacturing cell formation in the presence of flexible cell locations and material transporters

Abstract The effect of cell locations and material transporters in the formation of manufacturing cells is investigated in this paper. Automated guided vehicles (AGVs) using a tandem configuration are considered and a first-come-first-served (FCFS) principle is applied for transporting the material between machines or between the input/output (I/O) and a machine. Using the time taken to perform material transfers as a suitable measure, a polynomial programming model is developed for the problem. As the model can be shown strongly NP-hard, a higher-level heuristic algorithm based upon a concept known as ‘tabu search’ is presented. An example problem is solved to further demonstrate that cell locations indeed have a significant impact when material transfers are used in the design of manufacturing cells.

[1]  James T. Lin,et al.  A load-routeing problem in a tandem-configuration automated guided-vehicle system , 1994 .

[2]  R. Logendran,et al.  Manufacturing cell formation in the presence of lot splitting and multiple units of the same machine , 1995 .

[3]  John McAuley,et al.  Machine grouping for efficient production , 1972 .

[4]  A. Kusiak.  The generalized group technology concept , 1987 .

[5]  Philip M. Wolfe,et al.  Application of the Similarity Coefficient Method in Group Technology , 1986 .

[6]  P. Waghodekar,et al.  Machine-component cell formation in group technology: MACE , 1984 .

[7]  Ronald G. Askin,et al.  A graph partitioning procedure for machine assignment and cell formation in group technology , 1990 .

[8]  Leon F. McGinnis,et al.  Facility Layout and Location: An Analytical Approach , 1991 .

[9]  A. Kusiak,et al.  Efficient solving of the group technology problem , 1987 .

[10]  J. King.  Machine-component grouping in production flow analysis: an approach using a rank order clustering algorithm , 1980 .

[11]  Andrew Kusiak,et al.  Grouping of parts and components in flexible manufacturing systems , 1986 .

[12]  Rasaratnam Logendran,et al.  Impact of sequence of operations and layout of cells in cellular manufacturing , 1991 .

[13]  Yavuz A. Bozer,et al.  Tandem configurations for AGV systems offer simplicity and flexibility , 1989 .

[14]  Harold J. Steudel,et al.  A within-cell utilization based heuristic for designing cellular manufacturing systems , 1987 .

[15]  Nancy Lea Hyer,et al.  Group technology in the US manufacturing industry: A survey of current practices , 1989 .

[16]  Rasaratnam Logendran,et al.  A workload based model for minimizing total intercell and intracell moves in cellular manufacturing , 1990 .

[17]  Yavuz A. Bozer,et al.  Tandem Configurations for Automated Guided Vehicle Systems and the Analysis of Single Vehicle Loops , 1991 .

[18]  Fred Glover,et al.  Tabu Search: A Tutorial , 1990 .

[19]  R. Rajagopalan,et al.  Design of cellular production systems A graph-theoretic approach , 1975 .