Cellular manufacturing scheduling in the presence of multiple process routings and considering job splitting

Abstract

The main contribution of this study is the integration of the cell formation, cell scheduling and routing selection problems while considering job splitting and reentrant parts. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that investigates such an integrated problem with the job splitting approach. The aim is to find the assignment of machines to the cells, the assignment of operations to the machines, the amount of workload that is dedicated to each machine, and the sequence of operations on machines. The problem is formulated as a mixed-integer program so as to minimize the sum of processing, setup and inter-cell handling costs, plus the total weighted flow time of parts. Due to the computational complexity of the problem, two heuristics are presented to find efficient solutions. Finally, computational experiments are conducted to access the performance of the heuristics.