Group technology (GT) is a useful way to increase productivity with high quality in cellular manufacturing systems (CMSs), in which cell formation (CF) is a key step in the GT philosophy. When boundaries between groups are fuzzy, fuzzy clustering has been successfully adapted to solve the CF problem; however, it may result uneven distribution of parts/machines where the problem becomes larger. ...

Manufacturing industries are under intense pressure from the increasingly competitive global marketplace. Shorter product lifecycle, time to market and diverse customer needs have challenged manufacturers to improve the efficiency and productivity of their production activities. Manufacturing systems should be able to adjust or respond quickly to adopt necessary changes in product design and pr...

Today’s product demand and mix changes requiring reconfiguration of cells in each period of a multi-period planning horizon, This paper proposes a mixed-integer non-linear programming model for reconfigurable CMS design to meet changes in product mix & demand in each period of a multi-period planning horizon. The proposed model, to the best of author’s knowledge, is the most comprehensive model...

Cellular manufacturing systems are used when both production volume and product variety are at medium level. The fluctuations of volume and mix can reduce drastically the performance of classical cellular manufacturing systems. Therefore, several configurations have been proposed in literature as virtual manufacturing cells, fractal cells and remainder cells. This paper investigates the cell lo...

Industries are one of the main sources of pollution in the world. Besides, the levels of energy resources consumption including water, electricity, and fossil fuel are very different among industries. On the other hand, Iranian government pays a large amount of energy subsidy to manufacturing units. Because of it, the government wants to know which of manufacturing industries are efficient, pro...