A HIERARCHICAL MODEL FOR THE CELL LOADING PROBLEM OF CELLULAR MANUFACTURING SYSTEMS

A hierarchical cell loading approach is proposed to solve the producti on planning problem in cellular manufacturing systems. Our aim is to m inimize the variable cost of production subject to production and inve ntory balance constraints for families and items, and capacity feasibi lity constraints for group technology cells and resources over the pla nning horizon. The computational results indicated that the proposed a lgorithm was very efficient in finding an optimum solution for a set o f randomly generated problems.