An efficient heuristic for the design of cellular manufacturing systems with multiple identical machines

In practice, in a manufacturing system, there are multiple machines of some machine types to meet the capacity requirements. Therefore. this factor sh ould be: taken into consideration in the design of cellular manufacturing s ystems (CMS). On one hand: this is a constraint to be satisfied for the cel l formation problem, on the other hand, appropriate assignments of identica l machines to different cells will reducte and simplify intercell flows. Th us, we should make use of this advantage in cell formation. The problem is that we do not know the specific machine within the identical machines that are to be used for the processing of an operation, and so it is difficult to assign operations to a specific machine within the group of identical ma chines. By using the information of operation sequences for each part type. we present a graphical model that can describe the part families with resp ect to the machine types of multiple machines. Thus, the identical machines can be assigned into different cells based on the part families without in volving complex computation. With the model developed here, a merging-and-b reaking heuristic is proposed to solve concurrently both the traditional ce ll formation problem and the assignments of the identical machines to diffe rent cells. Three examples are taken to show the power and application of t he approach.