A COST-BASED ALGORITHM FOR DESIGN OF CELLULAR MANUFACTURING SYSTEMS

This paper describes a cost-based algorithm that deals with the design problems of Cellular Manufacturing Systems (CMS) associated exception al parts and bottleneck machines. The developed algorithm employes exp licitly the main elements of manufacturing costs, such as the fixed ma chine cost, the production cost, the setup cost, and the material hand ling cost. The algorithm is based on the minimization of sum of these costs, and considers three alternatives to solve exceptional issues. T he first alternative is to try to eliminate the maximum number of inte rcellular movements from the presently configured manufacturing system by buying and installing extra bottleneck machines into the appropria te cells. The second alternative considers the alternative process pla ns available and tries to complete the job using the overtime basis in the small machine cells. The third alternative considers the possibil ity of subcontracting the processing operations of exceptional part(s) to outside vendors to reduce the overall cost for the manufacturing s ystem. The total costs of the three cases are compared and the best al ternative for any given problem is identified. In order to illustrate performance of the algorithm developed, a test example is provided.