Formation of manufacturing cells based on material flows

The objective of many cell formation methods is to minimize overall material flows of parts. However, most methods do not incorporate several production factors that are extremely relevant to the material flows. We indicate and incorporate these factors into a nonlinear mathematical model and propose a heuristic methodology. Several problems are solved to illustrate the great benefits brought by these relevant production factors. We also test the computational performance of the proposed heuristic using three large-size problems. The computational results suggest that the approach produces reliable solutions in acceptable computational times.