Two-phase Approach for Solving Cell-formation Problem in Cell Manufacturing

One of the major steps in designing cellular manufacturing systems is to form cells. This involves identification of machine cells and part families. This paper proposes a modified heuristic method for forming manufacturing cells. The proposed method involves two phases. In the first phase, initial machine cells are identified by applying factor analysis to the matrix of similarity coefficients. In the second phase, an evolutionary algorithm is used to obtain the best component of machine cells and part-families. To evaluate its performance, the designed method was applied to sample problems from the literature. The results demonstrate that the designed method performs very well in terms of a number of criteria. In addition to its good performance, the proposed approach has the flexibility to allow the cell designer to either determine the required number of cells in advance, or consider it as a dependent variable.