A possibilistic approach for designing hybrid cellular manufacturing systems

Abstract

In this paper, a hybrid cellular manufacturing (HCM) system is presented in which the main sources of uncertainty, e.g. the demands of parts and unit costs are treated as fuzzy numbers in the form of possibilistic distributions. The basic concept of HCM is that high variation in demand might disturb cell efficiency, so forming cells with only those parts that have stable demand, will profit. Thus, to design stable and robust manufacturing cells, a two-phase method is proposed in which a fuzzy adaptive ranking method is first applied to identify those parts with low and non-repetitive demands (i.e. the special parts) which will then be assigned to a functional cell. Afterwards, an interactive possibilistic programming model is applied to cell formation of remaining regular parts while considering both part sequences and multiple routes. To show the capability and usefulness of the proposed method, an illustrative example is also provided. Finally, concluding remarks are reported.

Keywords:

• hybrid cellular manufacturing system
• fuzzy ranking
• possibilistic programming

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and constructive criticism.