A flexible cell formation approach for cellular manufacturing.

Abstract

Cell formation in cellular manufacturing deals with the identification of machines which can be grouped to create manufacturing cells as well as the identification of part families processed within each cell. Manufacturing flexibility is the property of the system components that are integrally designed and linked to each other in order to allow the adaptation to various tasks. This research focuses on classifying and quantifying several types of cellular manufacturing flexibility. These types are defined in order to respond to internal and external changes. Based on these definitions, we link components of the cellular manufacturing systems (part families and machine groups) to develop a CM flexibility hierarchy. Several cellular flexibility and structural measures are developed at each level of the CM flexibility hierarchy and for each component of the CM systems. These measures can be used in order to evaluate and/or design cellular manufacturing systems. A new cell formation method (Flexible Cell Formation method), which has several unique features, is developed. This method incorporates the flexibility measures in designing cellular systems and can generate several alternative designs with different levels of flexibility. The method developed also uses a new similarity measure which incorporates machine processing capability. The proposed method is compared to selected methods of cell formation. Finally, this research concludes with a comprehensive experimental analysis to investigate the impact of several input parameters. The results are used to show how each parameter should be set by the user of the method to incorporate specific types of flexibility.