Manufacturing Cell Design with Reduction in Setup Time through Genetic Algorithm

Cellular manufacturing emerged as a production strategy capable of solving the problems of complexity and long manufacturing lead times in batch production. The fundamental problem in cellular manufacturing is the formation of product families and machine cells. This paper presents a new approach for obtaining simultaneous arrangement of part families and machine cells for cellular manufacturing systems. The main feature of the proposed method is, the relevant production data such as process sequences and setup times are taken in to account. It has the ability to select the best solution among the solutions of compactness, group technology efficiency and reducing setup time efficiency for each part before attempting to cluster the machines and parts. The formation of part family and machine cell has been treated as a maximization problem according to a defined performance measure ‘β’. A genetic algorithm has been developed for solving the cell formation problem considering the reduction in setup time. The validation has been done based on a real time manufacturing data. This algorithm is written in the ‘C’ language on Intel Pentium / PIII compatible system.