FORMATION AND DYNAMIC ROUTEING OF PART FAMILIES AMONG FLEXIBLE MANUFACTURING CELLS

Very little research has focused on dynamic routeing of part families among flexible manufacturing cells, and most of this work has consider ed part-family formation and routeing as two unrelated decisions. This paper proposes a dynamic routeing. method using a fuzzy part-family f ormation method combined with a certainty factor procedure to suggest the favourable route in a multicell flexible manufacturing system (MCF MS). Computational simulations show that the proposed dynamic routeing method that seeks to balance workload in a multicell flexible manufac turing system is more effective than the fixed routeing method in redu cing mean flowtime, mean tardiness, and mean absolute lateness, in an environment characterized by high system utilization (85% or higher) a nd under a variety of demand patterns.