A Method of Component-Machine Cell Formation for Design of Cellular Manufacturing Systems

The concept of cellular manufacturing is to decompose a manufacturing system into subsystems, which are easier to manage than the entire manufacturing system. The objective of cellular manufacturing is to group parts with similar processing requirements into part families and machines into cells which meet the processing needs of part families assigned to them. This paper presents a methodology for cell formation based on genetic algorithm which produces improved cell formation in terms of total moves, which is a weighted sum of both intercell moves and intracell moves. A sample problem is solved for two, three and four cells with an approach based on genetic algorithms.