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ABSTRACT
The similarity of process requirements in cellular manufacturing (CM) frequently causes a load imbalance in production planning and control stage. Thus, the bottleneck phenomenon is not atypical in a CM environment. This work proposes a two-stage exhaustive bottleneck-based group scheduling procedure (BGSP) to improve cells with load imbalance. To our knowledge, the impact of the bottleneck management on group scheduling in job-shop cells is examined here for the first time. The BGSP attempts to fully utilize the bottleneck machine to minimize makespan. A simulation model and the experimental environment are designed for examining the performance of the BGSP and effects of the experimental factors, i.e., setup-to-run time ratio, number of part families, bottleneck-to-nonbottleneck load ratio, and scheduling rules. Scheduling rules compared herein consist of two single-stage and five two-stage group scheduling rules discussed in previous studies. The BGSP shows the best average makespan as well as the most robustness. Results in this work demonstrate the practical nature of bottleneck management on group scheduling in cellular manufacturing systems.