A multi-period cell formation model for reconfigurable manufacturing systems

Abstract

The effective design of a reconfigurable manufacturing system (RMS) exerts the need for a design approach to group the parts into families and determine the corresponding system configurations. A mixed integer programming model was developed to form simultaneously the part families and corresponding cell configurations in RMS in a dynamic production environment. A novel reconfiguration planning heuristic, responsible for determining the reconfiguration plan on both machines and system levels between successive time periods, is introduced. The model was tested by solving a dynamic cell formation problem and it was able to find the optimal solution found in the literature. Also a numerical example is included to illustrate the proposed model and the reconfiguration planning heuristic. © 2014 Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license.