This paper presents the idea of creating cells while reducing part-level sequence-dependent setup time in general cellular manufacturing systems (CMS). Setup time reduction in CMS has gained modest attention in the literature. This could be attributed to the fact that the fundamental problem in cell formation in CMS has been mainly related to material handling and machine utilization while setu...

The converting process from traditional production systems (e.g., Job Shops) to focused (cellular) systems is important as one requirement of global manufacturing to challenge the existing global financial crisis. This represents a big problem and a huge task for manufacturers and academicians which almost most of industrial enterprises around the world are still working as a job shop. This con...

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...

This paper uses panel cointegration and error correction models to unveil the direction of long-run causality between the real product wage and labor productivity at the industry level. I use two datasets of manufacturing industries: the EU-Klems dataset covering 11 industries in 19 developed economies, and the Unido Industrial Statistics Database covering 22 industries in 30 developed and deve...

In this paper, we present a simulated annealing (SA) and a genetic algorithm (GA) based on heuristics for scheduling problem of jobs in virtual cellular manufacturing systems. A virtual manufacturing cell (VMC) is a group of resources that is dedicated to the manufacturing of a part family. Although this grouping is not reflected in the physical structure of the manufacturing system, but machin...

This paper analyses the kind of coordination that is necessary in firms that use cellular manufacturing in producing parts. We distinguish two levels of coordination: internal and external. The coordination at these levels is further divided into primary and secondary coordination. In this study we concentrate on coordination requirements between cells with respect to the primary transformation...

The research in virtual cellular manufacturing (VCM) systems area gains momentum as markets have become more globalised. This is due to turbulent customer demands, characterised by frequent changes in product mix and volume. Therefore, if companies are interested in implementing manufacturing systems that can be quickly restructured with minimal cost and time, the approach of virtual cellular m...