Effect of the identification of key machines in the cell formation problem of cellular manufacturing system

Abstract Cellular manufacturing as been viewed as an important manufacturing philosophy that has helped both small and medium sized parts manufacturers increase their manufacturing productivity. In the analysis of a cellular manufacturing problem, identifying the key machines representing the manufacturing cells is an important step in the determination of final part-machine clusters. Three different methods have been proposed in this paper for performing this identification, and a more complete model taking into consideration the sequence of operations exhibited by parts have been developed for minimizing total moves. The total movefs contributed by all parts have been evaluated as a weighted sum of both inter- and intracell moves. A heuristic solution algorithm developed for the model has been operationalized by implementing the associated computer program on an IBM PC compatible microcomputer. The sensitivity of each of the three proposed methods with regard to identifying the key machines and their impact on the selection of final part-machine clusters has been analyzed by solving an example problem. The results obtained show that method 2 outperforms the other two (methods 1 and 3) in determining the best part-machine clusters in cellular manufacturing, thus making it a better decision tool to be used by both small and medium sized parts manufacturers in production planning.

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