A comparative case study of e-learning tools for manufacturing cell formation

Abstract

Manufacturing cell formation is the first and foremost issue in designing cellular manufacturing system. The main objective in the cell formation problem is to cluster machines into machine cells and parts into part families so that the minimum of both intercell and intracell flows will be achieved. The purpose of this paper is to enhance solving the cell formation problem with the help of e-Learning tools in the educational environment. An efficient method and supporting tool for solving manufacturing cell formation problem are proposed. Therefore, the original similarity coefficient-based heuristic (SCBH) algorithm for solving the cell formation problem is presented. It incorporates the pure combinatorial optimization models for maximization the sum of similarity coefficients between machine/part pairs. Additionally, the LAYOUT tool is offered as a supporting tool for the SCBH. A comparative case study is conducted to validate the performance of the proposed SCBH algorithm and LAYOUT tool, and the results showed that their implementation is significant for reducing both intercell and intracell flows. The results of this work can be helpful for future or existing practitioners to become the real-world cell formation problem solvers. © 2014 The Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers.