Load balancing for group technology planning and control

Abstract Recent work on the cell-formation method developed at the C.I.T. has shown that the grouping of production facilities can be carried out in a very convenient way if the workload of the potential cells is used as a weighting factor. It has also been observed that the enforcement of additional constraints in the linear program used to obtain solutions yields a selected set of solutions and greatly reduces the computing effort. At the various stages of the calculations, the analyst finds several courses of action open of him. Thereafter, each decision is made in accordance with the corresponding policies of the firm. An illustration of the method is presented for a workshop with 84 different production facilities and 1100 part components.