Complete and fractional cell formation using optimization techniques in cellular manufacturing systems

Abstract

In batch shop production environment the cost of manufacturing is inversely proportional to the batch size and the batch size determines productivity In real time environment the batch size of the components is often small leading to frequent changeovers larger machine idleness and so lesser productivity To alleviate this problem Group Technology can be implemented to accommodate small batches without losing much of production run time GT is a manufacturing philosophy based on the principle that similar things should be done similarly The Cellular Manufacturing System is one of the most important applications of GT to production CMS is used to divide the manufacturing facility into small cells in which the similar parts and its associated machines are grouped together to form a manufacturing cell The Machine Part Incidence Matrix MPIM based CF is recognized as an NP complete problem in the literature Thus in order to reduce newlinedifficulties in the CF there have been several methods to solve this CF problem These methods produce good solutions for well structured small size matrices where part families and machine cells exist naturally But so far they fail to produce ill structured large size matrices in the block diagonalization and end up with many exceptional elements newline