MINIMIZING TOTAL INTERCELL AND INTRACELL MOVES IN CELLULAR MANUFACTURING - GENETIC ALGORITHM APPROACH

Cellular manufacturing has been hailed as an effective way to improve productivity in parts manufacturing organizations. The objective of ce llular manufacturing is to group parts that have similar processing re quirements into part families and machines into groups (cells) which m eet the processing needs of pare families assigned to them. A problem is formulated which minimizes the intercell and intracell part movemen ts, and attention is focused on the minimum acceptable level of machin e utilization while selecting an assignment of parts to a cell. Machin e-cell - part-grouping problems are solved for two, three and four cel ls with an approach based on genetic algorithms. The results are super ior to the previous best in the published literature.