Evaluation of manufacturing cell loading rules for independent cells

In this paper, first the growing importance of cellular manufacturing is me ntioned and then cell loading and cell scheduling tasks are defined. Most o f the work reported in the cellular control area assumes the presence of a single cell and therefore focuses on cell scheduling only. However, this st udy considers a multicell environment where cell loading becomes crucial fo r controlling the entire system. New rules for cell loading are introduced, several possible combinations are presented, and two algorithms used for c ell loading are also described. Next, the characteristics of a real manufac turing setting, where the experimentation has been carried out, are describ ed in detail. In this system, products in each family can be assigned to mo re than one cell and also each cell can handle more than one family, thus c reating overlapping among cells. Experimentation includes five cells, 120 p roducts and four 6-month periods. The cells are considered as independent c ells, i.e. products are completed within a cell. The results of the experim entation showed that no single rule dominated others in terms of all perfor mance measures considered. However, a few rules produced similar results wi th respect to the numbers of tardy jobs? total tardiness and maximum tardin ess, whereas the recommended rules were quite different when cell utilizati on was considered.