Manufacturing Cell Formation in the Case of Multi-Manufacturing Processes

Abstract

The determination of a good decomposition of a manufacturing system into manufacturing cells, when various manufacturing processes are available for each type of product, is addressed in this paper. We propose a simple twofold algorithm. The first part of the algorithm aims at defining the proportion of each product type to manufacture, using each of the available manufacturing processes. The result is a monomanufacturing process problem, i.e. a problem which consists of finding a good decomposition of a manufacturing system into cells when only one manufacturing process is available for each type of product. The second part of the algorithm uses an approach already presented by the authors to solve the monomanufacturing process problem. We also present a numerical example to illustrate our approach.