A COMPREHENSIVE PRODUCTION ORIENTED TECHNIQUE FOR CELLULAR MANUFACTURING SYSTEM DESIGN

The current manufacturing environment is consistently posing enormous challenges to the manufacturing firms in the form of unpredictability in customer demands and ever decreasing product life cycles. To meet these challenges the manufacturing firms are required to perform even more effectively. Cellular Manufacturing (CM), a philosophy of group technology, possesses the ability to produce variety of products like job shop and at a comparatively faster rate like flow line. Therefore CM can help in facing these challenges. Though CM is very beneficial, its design for real life applications is very complex. Most of the techniques developed to design Cellular Manufacturing Systems (CMS) have considered it as a part-machine grouping problem only and overlooked the important production related information, such as demand of products, process details and the system availability. Therefore, this paper aims at developing a comprehensive design approach for CMS that takes in to account most of these production related information while designing the system. This approach simultaneously assigns parts and machines to suitable cells in such a way that no intercellular movement occurs and the work load of each cell is also balanced