Design of Cellular Manufacturing Systems with the Presence of Processing Time

In this paper, a heuristic procedure is developed to give the designer more flexibility to generate cells. This approach is designed to assign parts to the formed cell in the presence of processing times. The heuristic approach is consisting of several steps. The first step is to choose the minimum time from the available times for each job. Then part assignment steps will be done to the formed cells so as to minimize the number of exceptions. The last step is to make part assignment to the new rearranged time matrixes so as to achieve the highest cumulative processing times inside the cells. The first part assignment may lead to alternative optimal solutions. The superiority of the proposed approach is that it can be used to obtain the minimum energy inside the formed cells.