Cellular manufacturing system design has received much attention for the past three decades. The design process involves decisions on (i) cell formation, (ii) cell layout, and (iii) layout of cells on the shop floor. These decisions should be addressed jointly, if full benefits of cellular manufacturing are to be realised. However, due to the complexity of the problem, most researchers addresse...

We propose an integrated algorithm that will solve the part-family and machinecell formation problem by simultaneously considering the within-cell layout problem. To the best of our knowledge, this is the ® rst study that considers the e ciency of both individual cells and the overall system in monetary terms. Each cell should make at least a certain amount of pro® t to attain self-su ciency,...

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...

In recent years, artificial neural networks have been applied to solve a variety of problems in numerous areas of manufacturing at both system and process levels. The manufacturing applications of neural networks comprise the design of manufacturing systems (including part-family and machine-cell formation for cellular manufacturing systems); modeling, planning, and scheduling of manufacturing ...

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...

Design of Cellular Manufacturing System involves four major decisions: Cell formation (CF), Group layout (GL), Group scheduling (Gs) and Resource assignment (RA).  These problems should be regarded, concurrently, in order to obtain an optimal solution in a CM environment. In this paper a two stage heuristic procedure is proposed for CF and RA decisions problem. The solution approach contains a ...