Nowadays, we are witnessing the growth of firms that distribute the production capacity of their products to a wide geographic range to supply the demand of several markets. In this article, the relationships and interactions between cell design and supply chain design are investigated. For this purpose, a novel integrated model is presented for designing dynamic cellular manufacturing systems ...

The Internet has facilitated the development of e-businesses using web-based services leveraging back-end database systems, inventory systems and payment processing systems. Online retail businesses can be set up in a relatively short period of time. In contrast, set-up of a manufacturing system takes much longer; the system design involves various stages from gaining an understanding of the pr...

Next Generation Manufacturing Systems (NGMS) will support the Next Generation Manufacturing Enterprises (NGMEs). Adaptive distributed manufacturing systems seem to be a promising solution for NGMEs to provide increased levels of flexibility, reconfigurability and intelligence to respond to the highly dynamic market demands. Virtual Enterprises (VEs) are expected to be the dominant manufacturing...

Virtual prototyping in manufacturing gains more and more importance, since companies competing in industry noticed the increasing cost pressure alongside higher quality requirements. The utilization of virtual prototyping techniques provides a possibility to reduce the total development costs and the time to market, while simultaneously innovations of both products and processes increase the ov...

With the advent of information systems and the recent developments in computing technology, traditional manufacturing systems are fast becoming obsolete. A new generation of factories is being designed with cellular or linked-cell manufacturing systems. This recent shift from traditional to cellular manufacturing system has necessitated the redesign of the factory and its layout. Traditional pr...

This paper presents the idea of creating cells while reducing part-level sequence-dependent setup time in general cellular manufacturing systems (CMS). Setup time reduction in CMS has gained modest attention in the literature. This could be attributed to the fact that the fundamental problem in cell formation in CMS has been mainly related to material handling and machine utilization while setu...

Cellular manufacturing is a promising approach for grouping eeciency in manufacturing systems. Although this problem has been extensively studied in the literature, very few authors have proposed exact methods. The basic cellular manufacturing problem consists in deening cells which lead to the minimum number of bottleneck elements. In this paper, we consider a new formulation of the cellular m...

In this study, we highlight the impact of advanced new technical equipment on work design issues in a cellular manufacturing (CM) production environment. A large number of studies deal with the influence of technical systems on work design (e.g. Benders, 1993; McLoughin and Clark, 1994) or deal with work design issues in cellular manufacturing systems (e.g. Huber and Brown, 1991). However, as f...

  A fuzzy goal programming-based approach is used to solve a proposed multi-objective linear programming model and simultaneously handle two important problems in cellular manufacturing systems, viz. cell formation and layout design. Considerations of intra-cell layout, the intra-cell material handling can be calculated exactly. The advantages of the proposed model are considering machining cos...