Cell formation with alternative process plans and machine capacity constraints: a new combined approach

This paper addresses the problem of manufacturing cell formation with alternative process plans and machine capacity constraints. Given routings, capacities of machines and quantities of parts to produce, the problem consists in grouping machines into manufacturing cells and in selecting one process plan for each part. The objective is to minimize the inter-cell traffic, respecting machine capacity constraints. A new approach combining the simulated annealing method for the cell formation and a branch-and-bound method for the routing selection is presented. An illustrative example and numerical results are given.