Cellular manufacturing-A time-based analysis to the layout problem

A cellular manufacturing system is an application of group technology principles to production. This involves processing groups of similar components in a dedicated cluster of dissimilar machines. In this paper, an approach that forms the cluster based on the processing time is suggested. For even distribution of workload, workload balancing is carried out in the second phase of the model, i.e., a time-based model. The time-based model is compared with the workload-based model using a commonality score. The performance of the time-based model is compared by means of workload deviation and deviation index. The validity of the approach is tested by application to the problems from the literature and the results are presented. The results indicate that the time-based model gives better even distribution of workload as compared to the workload-based model.