A HEURISTIC-BASED PROCEDURE FOR THE WEIGHTED PRODUCTION-CELL FORMATION PROBLEM

A key issue in the design of a cellular manufacturing system is the fo rmation of the machines and parts into groups or production cells. The production cells are designed to minimize the costs of inter-cell par t movements and intra-cell processing, while balancing the workload wi thin each cell. Most of the prior research represents the cell formati on problem as a binary machine-part incidence matrix. The workload bal ance within each production cen can be precisely calculated only if th e processing times and demand rates are included in the analysis. For this reason, a heuristic-based procedure that uses processing times an d demand rates to form the production cells is proposed. The procedure considers the cell imbalance costs as well as the costs associated wi th the inter-cell part movements and intra-cell processing. The effici ency and effectiveness of the heuristic is compared with other methods , and an industrial application of the proposed heuristic is presented .