Lean manufacturing is a systematic approach to identifying and eliminating wastes (non-value added activities) through continuous improvement by conveying the product at the pull of the customer in pursuit of production. In a more basic term, more value with less work. Since lean manufacturing eliminates many of the problems associated with poor production scheduling and line balancing, lean ma...

The crucial step in the design of a Cellular Manufacturing (CM) system is the Cell Formation (CF) problem. This problem consists of identifying the part families and the machine groups and, consequently, forming manufacturing cells. The aim of this paper is to formulate a new multivariate approach based on a correlation analysis for solving CF problem. The proposed approach is carried out in tw...

Cellular manufacturing is a useful way to improve overall manufacturing performance. Group technology is used to increase the productivity for manufacturing high quality products and improving the flexibility of manufacturing systems. Cell formation is an important step in group technology. It is used in designing good cellular manufacturing systems. The key step in designing any cellular manuf...

This paper considers a group scheduling problem for manufacturing cells, in which parts may visit different cells. By addressing intra-cell scheduling, the sequence of parts within manufacturing cells is determined; however, in inter-cell scheduling the sequence of cells is obtained. We present a new mathematical model for a multi-criteria group scheduling problem in a cellular manufacture syst...

The problem context for this study is one of identifying families of parts having a similar sequence of operations. This is a prerequisite for the implementation of cellular manufacturing, group technology, just-in-time manufacturing systems and for streamlining material flows in general. Given this problem context, this study develops an experimental procedure to compare the performance of a f...

 This paper considers a bi-objective scheduling problem in a flexible manufacturing cell (FMC) which minimizes the maximum completion time (i.e., makespan) and maximum tardiness simultaneously. A new mathematical model is considered to reflect all aspect of the manufacturing cell. This type of scheduling problem is known to be NP-hard. To cope with the complexity of such a hard problem, a genet...

The combination of multi-functional machines and mobile robots supports the emergence of highly flexible intelligent manufacturing systems (IMS). In this kind of manufacturing system, some machines must stay fixed at previously established positions (heavy equipment) but some types of multi-functional machines (small flexible equipment and mobile robots) can stay in one position for one or seve...

Please cite this article in press as: Mahdav with Applications (2008), doi:10.1016/j.esw Cellular manufacturing (CM) is an industrial application of group technology concept. One of the problems encountered in the implementation of CM is the cell formation problem (CFP). The CFP attempted here is to group machines and parts in dedicated manufacturing cells so that the number of voids and except...