CONVERTING FUNCTIONAL MANUFACTURING SYSTEMS INTO FOCUSED MACHINE CELLS - A BICRITERION APPROACH

The main purpose of adopting cellular manufacturing (CM) is to achieve a preferred compromise between flow-line efficiency and job-shop flexibility. This paper presents a bicriterion approach to seek such a preferred design compromise in converting functional manufacturing systems into focused CM systems. The problem is formulated as a bicriterion nonlinear-integer programming model. The number of part types accommodated into the focused cells is employed as a measure of system flexibility and the average system similarity level is used as a measure of system efficiency. A heuristic algorithm, consisting of seeding, grouping, and inserting modules, is then proposed to solve the model. Finally, an example problem is included to illustrate the application of the model and solution procedure.