Designing and redesigning cellular manufacturing systems to handle demand changes

This paper presents a model for cell formation that allows for period-to-period demand variability and considers the size of the cell when determining the cost to process each part. The model also allows the composition of a cell to be changed from period to period. Five heuristic procedures are presented and tested. The best procedure is also compared with two other traditional approaches. The results show that considering demand variability and changing the cell composition during the planning horizon can result in better solutions.