A Heuristic-Based Procedure for the Weighted Production-Cell Formation Problem

A key issue in the design of a cellular manufacturing system is the formation of the machines and parts into groups or production cells. The production cells are designed to minimize the costs of inter-cell part movements and intra-cell processing, while balancing the workload within each cell. Most of the prior research represents the cell formation problem as a binary machine-part incidence matrix. The workload balance within each production cell can be precisely calculated only if the processing times and demand rates are included in the analysis. For this reason, a heuristic-based procedure that uses processing times and demand rates to form the production cells is proposed. The procedure considers the cell imbalance costs as well as the costs associated with the inter-cell part movements and intra-cell processing. The efficiency and effectiveness of the heuristic is compared with other methods, and an industrial application of the proposed heuristic is presented.