Because of bottleneck machines, the assignment of machine-cells to locations is interrelated with the machines' relative locations, and it makes the problem complicated to solve optimally. This paper prescribes an assignment of machine-cells to linear locations in order to minimize the inter-cell material handling cost incurred due to bottleneck machines in a cellular manufacturing system. This problem is formulated as a quadratic assignment problem (QAP). The optimal results can be obtained for a limited size of QAP. A 3-pair comparison heuristic is devised to partially overcome the dimensional problem for solving a large example. Later, an improvement heuristic called the 'bubble search' technique is developed to obtain a better solution, followed by the development of a lower bound on the QAP problem. Numerical examples are presented to illustrate the two heuristic procedures. A comparison between the optimal and heuristic solutions is also provided to evaluate the performance of the heuristics. Empirical tests conducted on two sets of data yield impressive test results.
Locating cells with bottleneck machines in cellular manufacturing systems
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