Production planning systems for cellular manufacturing

The application of group technology to production systems has in many firms led to the introduction of cellular manufacturing. This paper studies the changes that are required in the organization of the planning and control systems when applying cellular manufacturing. We review existing frameworks for designing such a planning and control system and propose a new framework that gives attention to decisions with respect to the aggregation and abstraction of information on resources, orders, and time. We discuss various contributions from literature on the applicability of well known approaches of planning and control to cellular manufacturing , such as Material Requirements Planning, Kanban, and Hierarchical Production Planning. We give specific attention to Burbidge’s contribution to production control, and to the use of Period Batch Control as a simple but often effective planning system for cellular manufacturing.