Group technology (GT) is a useful way to increase productivity with high quality in cellular manufacturing systems (CMSs), in which cell formation (CF) is a key step in the GT philosophy. When boundaries between groups are fuzzy, fuzzy clustering has been successfully adapted to solve the CF problem; however, it may result uneven distribution of parts/machines where the problem becomes larger. ...

One important issue regarding the implementation of cellular manufacturing systems relates to deciding whether to convert an existing job shop into a cellular manufacturing system comprehensively in a single go, or in stages incrementally by forming cells one after the other taking the advantage of the experiences of implementation. In this paper two heuristic methods based on multi-stage progr...

this article addresses a single row facility layout problem where the objective is to optimize the arrangement of some rectangular facilities with different dimensions on a line. regarding the np-hard nature of the considered problem, a hybrid meta-heuristic algorithm based on simulated annealing has been proposed to obtain a near optimal solution. a number of test problems are randomly generat...

Alcatel-Lucent is a major player in the eld of telecommunications. One of the products it o ers to network operators is wireless infrastructure such as base stations. Such equipment is delivered in cabinets. These cabinets are packed with various pieces of electronics: lters, ampli ers, circuit packs, etc. The exact con guration of a cabinet is dependent upon the circumstances it is being place...

Nowadays, the necessity of manufacturers’ response to their customers’ needs and their fields of activities have extended widely. The cellular manufacturing systems have adopted reduced costs from mass-production systems and high flexibility from job-shop manufacturing systems, and therefore, they are very popular in modern manufacturing environments. Manufacturing systems, in addit...

Today’s business environment has forced manufacturers and plants to produce high-quality products at low cost and the shortest possible delivery time. To cope with this challenge, manufacturing organizations need to optimize the manufacturing and other functions that are in logical association with each other. Therefore, manufacturing system design and supplier selection process are linked toge...

The cell formation problem is a classic manufacturing optimisation problem associated with the implementation of a cellular manufacturing system. A variety of hierarchical clustering procedures have been proposed for the solution of this problem. Essential for the operation of a clustering procedure is the determination of a form of similarity between the objects that are going to be grouped. I...

 Abstract—Virtual cellular manufacturing has attracted a lot of attention in recent years because traditional cellular manufacturing is inadequate under a highly dynamic manufacturing environment. In this paper, a new mathematical model is established for generating optimal production schedules for virtual cellular manufacturing systems operating under a multi-period manufacturing scenario. Th...