Loading policies in cellular manufacturing systems with remainder cell

Paolo Renna (1) , Michele Ambrico (1)

1 Difa - Dipartimento di Ingegneria e Fisica dell'Ambiente [Potenza]

Cellular manufacturing systems are used when both production volume and product variety are at medium level. The fluctuations of volume and mix can reduce drastically the performance of classical cellular manufacturing systems. Therefore, several configurations have been proposed in literature as virtual manufacturing cells, fractal cells and remainder cells. This paper investigates the cell loading approaches in a manufacturing system composed of dedicated cells and a remainder cell. The remainder cell consists of machines able to manufacture all part families. The loading decision concerns the allocation of the parts to the remainder cell, instead of the dedicated cell. A simulation environment based on Rockwell ARENA® has been developed to test the proposed approaches. The performance measures are evaluated in a very dynamic environment characterized by volume oscillations, mix fluctuations and machine failures. A classical cellular manufacturing system is used as a benchmark for the performance measures analyzed. The simulation results show that the proposed policies lead to better performance when market fluctuations occur.

Mots clés: Physical Sciences

Domaines: Sciences de l'ingénieur [physics]

Paolo Renna, Michele Ambrico. Loading policies in cellular manufacturing systems with remainder cell. International Journal of Computer Integrated Manufacturing, 2011, 24 (07), pp.661-675. ⟨10.1080/0951192X.2011.570791⟩. ⟨hal-00712364⟩