Design of Dedicated Manufacturing Cells with Operation Assignment

'Dedicated cells' is a new concept of forming manufacturing cells by assigning an operation type to cells and a machine will be dedicated for this operation type in a cell. This can result in advantages like reduced set-up time, learning effect, better quality, etc. In a demand environment where product demand and product mix changes periodically, the performance of a cell design depends on how is it suitable to accommodate these changes. This paper presents a mathematical model to design robust dedicated cells under the cases of multi-period, where demand changes from period to period. The solution methodology for the model is developed based on LINGO and Genetic Algorithm (GA). The result shows that computational time required using LINGO is high compared to GA. Different solutions can be obtained using this model by regulating the importance of heterogeneity variable in the objective function.