A Novel Approach for Cell Formation and Cell Layout Design in Cellular Manufacturing System

In recent years, researchers have devoted continuous efforts to study different facet of cellular manufacturing system (CMS). However, very few of them have tried to investigate both cell formation and the cell layout simultaneously. Different order/sequence of machine cells allocation may result in different total intercellular movement distance unit. Solving this problem is indeed very important in reducing the total intracellular and intercellular part movements which is especially significant with large production volume. In this paper, a mathematical model has been proposed to tackle the cell formation and cell layout simultaneously with consideration of both alternative routing and production volume. Due to the combinatorial nature of this model, a hybrid tabu search algorithm was applied to solve it. Unlike the existing method, the proposed algorithm does not demand a priori specification of the number of cells. Moreover, it can determine linear single-row layout or linear double-row layout. The results of the proposed method are compared with well-known approaches that are introduced in literature. These comparisons show that the proposed method offers good solutions for the CMS problem.