An effective methodology for cell formation and intra-cell machine layout design in cellular manufacturing system using parts visit data and operation sequence data

Cellular manufacturing is an efficient approach for implementing the principles of Group Technology in a manufacturing environment. Most of the previous studies in CMS have focused mainly on cell formation problem. However, only few researches have discussed on CFP and CLP, simultaneously. In this paper, we present a new heuristic approach based on modified flow matrix which simultaneously considers cell formation, intracellular machine layout, exceptional elements and voids issues in the CMS design using sequence data and number of parts visit data between the machines. Above-mentioned data provide valuable information about the various jobs in a manufacturing system. The objective of our proposed approach is to group similar parts and corresponding different machines in same cells and additionally considering the sequence of machines, exceptional elements and voids. Moreover, our proposed approach considers inter-cell movement, backward movements, number of voids and number of operations. A new performance measure modified group technology efficacy is proposed for evaluating the performance of the proposed methodology. Two well-known benchmark problems from the literature are considered and results are compared with the existing methods. The results clearly demonstrated that our proposed approach outperforms the previously proposed methods.