One of the crucial steps in the design of a cellular manufacturing system is the cell formation problem, which involves grouping the parts into part families and machines into manufacturing cells, so that parts with similar processing requirements are manufactured within the same cell. When modelling this problem it is usually assumed that the specific machine in which each operation is carried...

Concurrent engineering (CE) has emerged as an essential design principle that facilitates rapid and efficient product development that is necessary to survive in today’s fiercely competitive environment. However, the lack of tools that address design team formulation and proper design task assignment in CE has made its application an immense challenge. In this article we explicitly address this...

production planning is performed through diverse methods according to the type of the system it is structured upon. one of the most important steps before production planning is to determine which system best fits the firm, and how the facilities should be designed. both job-shop and group-technology systems have their own pros and cons, each of which is suitable to a specific kind of factory. ...

For each industrial, lean manufacturing is “The method” to improve productivity and reduce cost. One of the tools for lean is cellular manufacturing. This technique reduces the factory to several small entities, which are easier to manage. The main difficulty of the cellular manufacturing is the creation of these small entities called cells. When the flexibility is used during the production pr...

-This paper discusses and reviews a fundamental issue in cellular manufacturing--cell formation. This problem is of strategic and operational importance in that it affects the fundamental structure and the overall layout of a cellular manufacturing system. We first provide a comprehensive mathematical formulation of the cell formation problem and then propose a methodology-based classification ...

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 manufacturin...

Cell formation problem (CFP) is one of the main problems in cellular manufacturing systems. Minimizing exceptional elements and voids is one of the common objectives in the CFP. The purpose of the present study is to propose a new model for cellular manufacturing systems to group parts and machines in dedicated cells using a part-machine incidence matrix to minimize the voids. After identifying...