MANUFACTURING CELL-FORMATION IN THE PRESENCE OF FLEXIBLE CELL LOCATIONS AND MATERIAL TRANSPORTERS

The effect of cell locations and material transporters in the formatio n of manufacturing cells is investigated in this paper. Automated guid ed vehicles (AGVs) using a tandem configuration are considered and a f irst-come-first-served (FCFS) principle is applied for transporting th e material between machines or between the input/output (I/O) and a ma chine. Using the time taken to perform material transfers as a suitabl e measure, a polynomial programming model is developed for the problem . As the model can be shown strongly NP-hard, a higher-level heuristic algorithm based upon a concept known as 'tabu search' is presented. A n example problem is solved to further demonstrate that cell locations indeed have a significant impact when material transfers are used in the design of manufacturing cells. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.