A Multi-period Cell Formation Model for Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems

The effective design of a reconfigurable manufacturing system (RMS) exerts the need for a design approach to group the parts into families and determine the corresponding system configurations. A mixed integer programming model was developed to form simultaneously the part families and corresponding cell configurations in RMS in a dynamic production environment. A novel reconfiguration planning heuristic, responsible for determining the econfiguration plan on both machines and system levels between successive time periods, is introduced. The model was tested by solving a dynamic cell formation problem and it was able to find the optimal solution found in the literature. Also a numerical example is included to illustrate the proposed model and the reconfiguration planning heuristic.