Design of Cellular Manufacturing System for Dynamic Production Requirements

Cellular Manufacturing System (CMS) provides great benefits as compared to traditional manufacturing systems. The design of cellular manufacturing systems is complex for real life problems. Existing design methods employ simplifying assumptions, which often deteriorate the validity of the models used for obtaining solutions. Assumption used in existing design methods is that product-mix and demand do not change over the planning horizon. The purpose of this study is to develop solution approach for designing cellular manufacturing systems for dynamic production requirements. The CMS model with dynamic production belongs to a class of NP-Complete problems that cannot be solved by traditional optimization methods. Thus, simulated annealing (SA) method is proposed to solve the problem. After discussing the method and presenting the model, it is applied on randomly generated problem based upon published data in the CMS design literature with two period planning horizons to validate the efficacy of the algorithm so developed. The proposed model reduces total cost of CMS.