This thesis presents a comprehensive methodology for the design of a hybrid manufacturing shop layout that comprises both manufacturing cells and individual workcenters. The proposed approach targets the minimization of the material handling effort within the shop and comprises four basic steps (1) identification of candidate manufacturing cells, (2) evaluation and selection of the cells to be implemented, (3) determination of the intra-cell layout, and (4) determination of the shop layout.

For the first step, an existing cell formation technique has been employed and enhanced to facilitate reduction of part setup times. The resulting manufacturing cells are evaluated with respect to the expected reduction in material handling and the most significant ones are selected for implementation. The layout of each selected cell is determined to minimize the material handling between the cell resources. For this purpose a stimulated annealing (SA) algorithm is employed which accounts fully for all physical cell constraints. Once the sizes and shapes of the selected cells are known, the shop layout is determined by a similar algorithm. the resulting hybrid shop consists of the selected cells and the remaining machines. The methodology has been implemented in an integrated software system and has been applied to redesign the shop of a large manufacturing of radar antennas.