MANUFACTURING CELLS DESIGN WITH ALTERNATIVE ROUTINGS IN GENERALIZED GROUP TECHNOLOGY: REDUCING THE COMPLEXITY OF THE SOLUTION SPACE

Kimon Spiliopoulos , Stella Sofianopoulou (1)

1 Department of Industrial Mgmt and Tech

In the presence of alternative routings, the manufacturing cells design involves the solution of a large number of (simple) cell formation problems. We present a bounding scheme which examines all combinations of alternative routings and solves only a few cell formation problems, thereby limiting the solution space which is searched heuristically. This leads to increased reliability of the solutions obtained. The resulting algorithm is shown to be applicable for problems arising in practice frequently, when the initial design includes relatively few exceptional elements, and machine duplication and/or genuine multiple process plans are used correctively, to eliminate the remaining intercellular traffic.

Mots clés: Physical Sciences

Kimon Spiliopoulos, Stella Sofianopoulou. MANUFACTURING CELLS DESIGN WITH ALTERNATIVE ROUTINGS IN GENERALIZED GROUP TECHNOLOGY: REDUCING THE COMPLEXITY OF THE SOLUTION SPACE. International Journal of Production Research, 2007, 45 (06), pp.1355-1367. ⟨10.1080/00207540600719674⟩. ⟨hal-00512911⟩