An integrated model of cellular manufacturing and supplier selection considering product quality

Today’s business environment has forced manufacturers and plants to produce high-quality products at low cost and the shortest possible delivery time. To cope with this challenge, manufacturing organizations need to optimize the manufacturing and other functions that are in logical association with each other. Therefore, manufacturing system design and supplier selection process are linked together as two major and interrelated decisions involved in viability of production firm. As a matter of fact, production and purchasing functions interact in the form of an organization’s overall operation and jointly determine corporate success. In this research, we tried to show the relationship between designing cellular manufacturing system (CMS) and supplier selection process by providing product quality considerations as well as the imprecise nature of some input parameters including parts demands and defects rates. A unified fuzzy mixed integer linear programming model is developed to make the interrelated cell formation and supplier selection decisions simultaneously and to obtain the advantages of this integrated approach with product quality and consequently reduction of total cost. Computational results also display the efficiency of proposed mathematical model for simultaneous consideration of cellular manufacturing design and supplier selection as compared to when these two decisions separately taken into account

Cell forming and cell balancing of virtual cellular manufacturing systems with alternative processing routes using genetic algorithm

Cellular manufacturing (CM) is one of the most important subfields in the design of manufacturing systems and as a recently emerged field of study and practice, virtual cellular manufacturing (VCM) inherits the importance from CM. One type of VCM problems is VCM with alternative processing routes from which the route for processing each part should be selected. In this research, a bi-objective mathematical programming model is designed in order to obtain optimal routing of parts, the layout of machines and the assignment of cells to locations and to minimize the production costs and to balance the cell loads. The proposed mathematical model is solved by multi-choice goal programming (MCGP). Since CM models are NP-Hard, a genetic algorithm (GA) is utilized to solve the model for large-sized problem instances and the results obtained from both methods are compared. Finally, a conclusion is made and some visions for future works are offered.Cellular manufacturing (CM) is one of the most important subfields in the design of manufacturing systems and as a recently emerged field of study and practice, virtual cellular manufacturing (VCM) inherits the importance from CM. One type of VCM problems is VCM with alternative processing routes from which the route for processing each part should be selected. In this research, a bi-objective mathematical programming model is designed in order to obtain optimal routing of parts, the layout of machines and the assignment of cells to locations and to minimize the production costs and to balance the cell loads. The proposed mathematical model is solved by multi-choice goal programming (MCGP). Since CM models are NP-Hard, a genetic algorithm (GA) is utilized to solve the model for large-sized problem instances and the results obtained from both methods are compared. Finally, a conclusion is made and some visions for future works are offered