A Heuristic Approach for Machine Cell Formation Problems with Alternative Routings

Cell Formation (CF) is an important problem in today's automated batch type production systems. It reduces material handling cost, processing time, labor requirement, in-process inventories, number of set-ups, simplifies process plan, and increases quality of product. Manufacturing equipments of automated manufacturing systems are highly multifunctional. As a result, production processes can be done by multiple process routes. Optimum cell formation can lead to more independent cells and less intercellular movement of parts. Previous research reveals that most of the researchers considered single route, unique volume of parts, non-sequential Cell Formation Problem (CFP). However, intercellular movements of parts depend on parts volume, sequence of processes, and routes. In this paper, a heuristic approach based on Euclidean Distance matrix is proposed for CF in multiple routes, process sequential and parts volume (included with batch size and number of batches) problems. Computational experiments were performed with five benchmark problem sets taken from the literature and the results demonstrate that the performances of the proposed heuristic in terms of intercellular movements of parts are either better than or competitive with the well-known existing algorithms.