Interactive design of cellular manufacturing systems, optimality and flexibility

Optimal design and flexible manufacturing are two objectives that have to be achieved in cellular manufacturing systems. Achieving both objectives will optimize the inter-cell movements of parts which will lead to a minimum number of voids and exceptions. The main problem in designing cellular manufacturing systems is cell formation. In the process of forming such manufacturing cells, the designer is faced with the constraint of limited number of cells, therefore the designer needs to specify the number of cells in advance. A number of heuristic methods have been developed in the literature to come up with acceptable but not optimal results due to the complexity of these optimization problems. In this paper a special case algorithm for generating a two-cell formation will be developed with unbounded cell size based on Stirling number. The aim of the proposed 2-cell algorithm is to obtain exact and optimal solutions, and to give flexibility to the system designer in order to decide and choose among alternative optimal solutions for machine-part incidence matrix. The superiority of the proposed algorithm for designing cellular manufacturing systems is to develop an approach that not only specifies the number of cells in advance but also determines all the possible ways to form p-cells from n-machines. To demonstrate the merits of the proposed 2-cell algorithm in designing machine-part matrix, the researcher borrows industrial problems cited in the literature to show that the developed algorithm offers designers better if not the same clusters as compared with known methods. The proposed approach is interactive in the sense that the designer can choose the suitable 2-cell design for a given scenario. Further, when the optimization routine is linked to automated cell layout software, the designer can interactively compare alternative cell designs and layouts and choose the most appropriate.