Towards a psychologically consistent cellular manufacturing system

In cellular manufacturing systems (CMSs), an operator plays an important role. Because operators work for long-time periods in a production area, an increase in job satisfaction and system productivity occurs if the consistency of operators’ personal characteristics are considered in the design of CMSs. In a CMS, a cell formation problem (CFP) focuses on grouping and allocating machines, part families and operators to manufacturing cells. This paper considers a decision-making style (DMS) as an operator’s personal characteristic index in a CFP for designing a psychologically consistent CMS. DMS influences not only the interaction between two operators, but also the work that operator does on a machine. Hence, this paper develops a novel multi-objective mathematical model for the CFP considering consistency between each two operators in each cell and consistency between operator and his/her assigned machine(s). Because of possibility of a change in the primary DMS of a person to the backup one, this paper tackles this issue by applying a probabilistic procedure. Two hybrid meta-heuristic algorithms are developed for the large-sized test problems. In addition, the PROMETHEE-II method is applied to select the best Pareto solution. Finally, a real case study is presented to show the applicability of the developed approach.