Dynamic routing and the performance of automated manufacturing cells

There has been a considerable amount of research done on the "cell formatio n" problem, in which machining cells are designed to process a family of co mponents. More recently, it has been suggested that machining cells should be designed so that they take advantage of the flexibility for processing p arts that have alternate, or multiple machine routing possibilities. It is argued that such flexibility will improve machine utilization as well as ot her measures of cell performance and may reduce the need for centralized ce ll loading and scheduling algorithms. Unfortunately, if the cell is automat ed, routing flexibility requirements can create a complex control problem f or the cell controller. In this paper we implement a cell controller design ed to handle the requirements of the flexible routing of parts and compare the performance of the cell to the case in which each part has only one rou ting. We find that significant improvements occur when the cell design is c apable of processing parts with flexible routings.