Cellular manufacturing (CM) is one of the most important subfields in the design of manufacturing systems. As a recently emerged field of study and practice, virtual cellular manufacturing (VCM) is of enormous importance as one of the types of CM . One kind of VCM problems is VCM with alternative processing routes from which the route for processing each part should be selected. In this study, ...

In this paper, a mixed-integer linearized programming (MINLP) model is presented to design a group layout (GL) of a cellular manufacturing system (CMS) in a dynamic environment and considering production planning (PP) decisions. This model incorporates an extensive coverage of important manufacturing features used in the design of CMSs. There are also some features that make the presented model...

This paper presents several local search meta-heuristics for the problem of scheduling a single machine to minimise total weighted tardiness. A genetic algorithm for the static single machine total weighted tardiness problem is presented, and a multi-start version named metaGA is proposed. The obtained computational results permit to conclude about their efficiency and effectiveness. The resolu...

Currently, materials flow optimization and creating of optimal job scheduling are one of the main tasks of all company for increase of competitiveness. A schedule problem in a manufacturing company is characterized as jobs sequence and allocation on machines during a time period. The first part of this article is focused on dynamic scheduling and its methods. The second part describes a case st...

Economic growth in Sub-Saharan Africa has been characterized by deindustrialization. Conventional economists argue that this is due to a bad environment for business decision making. This paper provides a classical explanation for deindustrialization, the failure to solve the food problem. That is, food staple prices have risen rapidly resulting in labor becoming costly, although physically abu...

The Accessories Division of Thompson Products, Inc., is manufacturing hundreds of different types of assemblies including a variety of fUel pumps. The bulk of these products are manufactured in appropriate lot sizes to meet shipping commitments. As a part of a broad assignment to determine what role electronic data processors should play at Thompson Products, a study to improve this job-shop ty...

In this paper, we compare the effects of machine pooling and labor chaining by means of a simulation study. In this study, the independent variables are: (1) the level of machine pooling (no. of jobs that can be produced in more than one cell), (2) the level of labor chaining (no. of workers able to work in more than one cell), and (3) labor utilization/machine utilization. The dependent variab...