Cell formation considering real-life production parameters

Cell formation problem (CFP) consists of identifying machine groups and part families in cellular manufacturing system. A large number of papers on cell formation have been published so far, but very few of them have incorporated operation sequence in inter-cell movement calculations while considering production volume, batch size and material handling capacity, processing time, setup time, machine capacity and allocating units of identical machines into different cell with balanced workload. Considerations of these important parameters make the cell formation problem complex but more realistic. The paper describes a solution methodology (algorithm) for the problem of cell formation to minimise the total inter-cell movements and allocate the duplicate machines to appropriate cells such that the workload is uniform on the machines. The computational procedure of the algorithm has been illustrated by an example. Numerical results indicate that the proposed methodology is flexible, efficient and effective even for industrial problems.