Understanding the Design Continuum Between Group Technology and Fractal Cell Designs for Manufacturing Systems Through the Central Backup Cellular Manufacturing System

In this paper, we present and analyze a new layout arrangement that we call the central backup cellular manufacturing systems (CBCMS). The CBCMS organization is inspired by the concept of the remainder cell in group technology (GT) systems in which products that are not easily partitioned in the parts-machine incidence matrix are allocated to the remainder cell. It is also inspired by the fractal cell organization in which machine types are dispersed roughly equally through the fractal cells. The GT layout is known to be efficient if parts can be easily partitioned into distinct cells, making the remainder cell either unnecessary or small. The fractal layout, on the other hand, is flexible and robust against internal (machine breakdowns) and external disturbances (demand variations). The central question addressed in this paper is whether GT and fractal cell systems can be unified within a single conceptual framework. This paper shows how the CBCMS is the unification framework to explore the design continuum between the GT and fractal cell configurations. With the help of an example, it also shows how the multi-commodity network flow–based formulation for the multi-period cell formation problem (MPCFP; Venkatadri et al. in Int J Adv Manuf Technol 91(1–4):175–187, 11 ) can be used as a springboard to generate a series of GT, fractal, or CBCMS layout designs for evaluation.