Makespan as a design tool for CMS design

Abstract

Industries have to cope with millions of parts for production on daily basis. Scheduling of those parts for production is a complex process. Parts having properly scheduled processing rarely get delayed and therefore generally delivered on time. Cellular Manufacturing System (CMS) is a proficient production system and can be used as an effective replacement of Batch type manufacturing. Cell Formation (CF) is the fundamental part of Cell design and its effectiveness is checked using a performance index called Grouping Efficacy (GE).Part scheduling is very rarely used as a design tool for Cell Formation Problem (CFP). A software based solution is developed in this research to solve CFP by applying Genetic Algorithm (GA), which is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) technique. The uniqueness of this approach is that it presents an integrated approach for grouping parts into families and machines into cells using Makespan as the performance factor. Results show that minimizing the Make span maximizes the GE.