Multiple routeings and capacity considerations in group technology applications

SUMMARY This paper addresses the problem of manufacturing cell formation, given multiple part routeings, and multiple functionally similar workcentres. Cellular manufacturing is intended to facilitate production, and thus should be based on projected production requirements. The originality of the approach lies in considering both the manufacturing system as well as projected production, and distributing the demand among alternate routeings in order to obtain a better manufacturing cell design. The suggested choice of part routeings favours the decomposition of the manufacturing system into manufacturing cells in a way that minimizes part traffic, along with satisfying the part demand and workcentre capacity constraints. We show that the problem can be formulated as a linear programming type problem which simultaneously addresses two problems: (i) routeing selection, and (ii) cell formation. The common objective is to minimize the inter-cell traffic in the system. The proposed algorithm iteratively solves...