An Integrated Model for the Design of Cellular Manufacturing Systems

Cellular manufacturing (CM) is a production approach directed towards reducing costs, as well as increasing system's flexibility in today's small-to-medium lot production environment. Many structural and operational issues should be considered for a successful CM design and implementation; such as cell formation (CF), production planning, group layout (GL), resource allocation and scheduling. Most researchers have addressed these issues sequentially or independently, instead of jointly optimizing a combination of these issues. In order to attain better results to ensure that the system will be capable of remaining efficient in unknown future situations, these issues should be addressed simultaneously. In this paper possibility of developing a comprehensive mathematical model which considers these issues is discussed.