Title: A survey of cellular manufacturing design methods

Authors: Yaowu Zhang

Addresses: R&D Department, Powell Industries Inc., Houston, TX 77075, USA

Abstract: Manufacturing firms must take steps to adopt themselves to the severe worldwide competition and customer awareness of various products which are forcing them to seek more efficiency, more flexibilities, and more timely deliveries at a low cost if all possible. As one of the most important applications of group technology in production, cellular manufacturing system was surveyed in this study. The evolutions of manufacturing/production systems are briefly reviewed. Issues in cellular manufacturing system and cell formation techniques of similarity coefficient and heuristic algorithms are thoroughly presented. Cell formation strategies are also identified in details. Part families and machine cells in cell formation still remain the critical element in designing an efficient cellular manufacturing system. However, it is a very complex problem and thus needs to be investigated more in the future.

Keywords: group technology; cellular manufacturing systems; CMS design; similarity coefficient; part families; machine cells; manufacturing cells; heuristics; cell formation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCENT.2012.052388

International Journal of Collaborative Enterprise, 2012 Vol.3 No.1, pp.72 - 87

Published online: 10 Apr 2015 *

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