MANUFACTURING CELL-FORMATION UNDER RANDOM PRODUCT DEMAND

The performance of cellular manufacturing systems is intrinsically sen sitive to demand variations and machine breakdowns. A cell formation m ethodology that addresses, during the shop design stage, system robust ness with respect to product demand variation is proposed. The system resources are aggregated into cells in a manner that minimizes the exp ected inter-cell material handling cost. The statistical characteristi cs of the independent demand and the capacity of the system resources are explicitly considered. In the first step of the proposed approach the expected value of the feasible production volumes, which respect r esource capacities, are determined. Subsequently, the shop partition t hat results in near optimal inter-cell part traffic is found. The appl icability of the proposed approach is illustrated through a comprehens ive example.