A decision support system for cell formation

This paper presents a decision support system to form manufacturing cells. The system consists of four modules: (1) User Interface Module, (2) Cell Formation Module, (3). Performance Evaluation Module, and (4) Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis Module. By considering the cell design problem as a multi-criteria decision analysis problem, this menu-driven, interactive programme forms the cells and prompts the user to compare the performance of each cell using Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). It is hoped that the combination cell formation techniques and AHP through a computerized method will facilitate the design of cellular manufacturing systems in real life industrial applications