An Integrated Approach for the Operational Design of a Cellular Manufacturing System

Abstract

Shorter product life cycles, unpredictable demand patterns and the ever-shrinking time to market, have been constantly keeping the manufacturing firms under a lot of pressure. To face these challenges the manufacturing organizations have been shifting to Cellular Manufacturing (CM) due to its benefits of reducing manufacturing costs, increasing flexibility and delivering orders on time. Despite having several benefits, designing a Cellular Manufacturing System (CMS) for a real-life application is a tough ask. The main challenge is the part-machine grouping in cells. It becomes even more challenging when the group scheduling (GS) problem is handled alongside the part-machine clustering. To take up this challenge, an integrated model is developed during this research which handles the machine-part grouping and the GS problems, simultaneously. To optimize the multiple objectives of maximizing Grouping Efficacy (GE) and minimizing Makespan (Cmax), concurrently, a Hybrid Genetic Algorithm (HGA) based approach is developed. The proposed technique is validated through the famous benchmark problems, unlike the several approaches already available in literature. The computational results have shown that the integrated approach, presented in this paper, is more effective as compared to a sequential technique. Also, its accuracy remains intact even if it is applied to large sized problems.