A Heuristic-Based Procedure for the Weighted Production-Cell Formation Problem

Abstract

A key issue in the design of a cellular manufacturing system is the formation of the machines and parts into groups or production cells. The production cells are designed to minimize the costs of inter-cell part movements and intra-cell processing, while balancing the workload within each cell. Most of the prior research represents the cell formation problem as a binary machine-part incidence matrix. The workload balance within each production cell can be precisely calculated only if the processing times and demand rates are included in the analysis. For this reason, a heuristic-based procedure that uses processing times and demand rates to form the production cells is proposed. The procedure considers the cell imbalance costs as well as the costs associated with the inter-cell part movements and intra-cell processing. The efficiency and effectiveness of the heuristic is compared with other methods, and an industrial application of the proposed heuristic is presented.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ting Li Lin

Ting Li Lin is currently a part-time Lecturer in the Information and Operations Management Department in the School of Business Administration at the University of Southern California. He received his B.S. in Marine Engineering and Naval Architecture from Chung-Cheng Institute of Technology (Taiwan), M.S. in Systems Engineering from West Coast University (Los Angeles), and Ph.D. in Industrial and Systems Engineering from University of Southern California. He is a member of IIE, ORSA and TIMS. His research interests include production and operations management, operations research, statistic simulation and defense resource planning.

Maged M. Dessouky

Maged M. Dessouky is Assistant Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Southern California. He received his Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering from University of California, Berkeley, M.S.I.E. and B.S.I.E. from Purdue University. Before joining the faculty at USC, Dr Dessouky was employed at Hewlett-Packard (Systems Analyst), Bellcore (Member of Technical Staff), and Pritsker Corporation (Senior Systems Analyst). He is a senior member of HE and a member of ORSA and POMS. His research interests include production and operations management, modeling of manufacturing processes and systems, simulation, and operations research applications to industrial systems.

K. Ravi Kumar

K. Ravi Kumar is Professor of Operations Management and Chairman of the Information and Operations Management Department in the School of Business Administration at the University of Southern California. He received his B. Tech in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (Madras), his M.S. in Industrial Engineering from the University of Texas at Arlington and Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences from Northwestern University. He taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign until 1986 before joining the University of Southern California. He has received several awards for Teaching Excellence. His research interests include management issues in computer integrated manufacturing, flexible and cellular manufacturing systems, and manufacturing-marketing interface.

Shu Ming Ng

Shu Ming Ng is currently a Lecturer in the Department of Management at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He received his Ph.D. in Industrial Administration from Carnegie Mellon and M.Sc. from Stanford University. Before joining HKUST, he was an Assistant Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Southern California.