Formation of independent manufacturing cells with the consideration of multiple identical machines

Cellular manufacturing is a manufacturing philosophy with the goal to produce low-medium volume products with high variety, while maintaining the high productivity of large-scale production. It is recognised as one of the most powerful management innovations in job-shop and batch production. Among the problems of designing a cellular manufacturing system, cell formation is the central and foremost issue. In the present paper, we investigate the formation of independent manufacturing cells with the consideration of multiple identical machines, in which inter-cell movements are completely eliminated by allocating identical machines in different manufacturing cells. Incorporating many real-life production factors including processing time, set-up time, alternative processing routes, machine capacity, batch size and cell size, we formulate a bi-objective mathematical model to minimise workload imbalance among manufacturing cells. Then, a genetic algorithm based on non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm II is developed to solve it. The computational results of numerical examples and the comparison analysis validated the performance of the proposed algorithm.