AN ALGORITHM FOR THE CELL-FORMATION AND THE MACHINE SELECTION-PROBLEMS IN THE DESIGN OF A CELLULAR MANUFACTURING SYSTEM

In this paper, we consider the cell formation and the machine selectio n problems for the design of a new cellular manufacturing system. The objective is to solve these problems in an acceptable time while consi dering machine capacity, alternative routeing and constraints on cell size. We propose a heuristic algorithm which consists of two main reso lution phases. The first phase forms a configuration of independent ce lls using a cell aggregation procedure. The second phase considers the introduction of intercell flow to eliminate the machines that are und er-utilized. An illustrative numerical example and computational exper ience are conducted.