Manufacturing cells design with flexible routing capability in presence ofunreliable machines

Flexible manufacturing systems generally provide the possibility to use dif ferent process plans to manufacture a part owing to versatile machines. In this context, the design of manufacturing cells includes two problems, the constitution of the cells of machines and the assignment of the process pla ns to be used by the parts. Flexible routings allow the machines usage fact or and the throughput time to be improved. The manager of such a system can also change the process plans to bypass unusable machines. The design of r obust cell configurations which can accommodate different process plans ass ignment is an important issue. This paper proposes a new approach for desig ning manufacturing cells when the process plans can be changed because of m achine breakdowns. The impact of our method is illustrated through a small example. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.