Routes of Material Handling Equipment in the Design of Cellular Manufacturing

Cellular Manufacturing Systems (CMS) have claimed many advantages over traditional job shop processes. Some of the advantages reported by several users ofCMS are reduction in throughput time, reduction in WIP inventory, improvement in product quality, faster response time to customer orders, shorter move distances, increase in manufacturing flexibility, and greater job satisfaction. In its implementation, CMS organizes a production floor into manufacturing cells. Hence, the important issue that needs to be addressed first is the cell formation (CF) problem. CF deals with the identification of part families, machine groups, and allocation of part families and machine groups to cells or vice versa. In the past, most studies in CF have assumed that the location of a cell is known a priori and a unique route exists between two cells. However, in an actual manufacturing environment, alternative locations are available for locating each cell. Similarly, when the capacity of the material handler being used is limited, alternative routes may have to be used to move part loads between two cells. In this research, the issues dealing with alternative cell locations and alternative routes of material handling equipment are investigated. In addition, several othe