Design of manufacturing cells for uncertain production requirements

Cellular manufacturing has been seen as an effective strategy to the changing worldwide competition. Most of the existing cell design methods ignore the existence of stochastic production requirements and routing flexibility. In this study, a simulation based Fuzzy Goal Programming model is proposed for solving cell formation problems considering stochastic production requirements and routing flexibility. The model covers the objectives of minimizing the number of exceptional elements, maximizing system utilization, minimizing mean tardiness and minimizing the percentage of tardy jobs. The simple additive method and max-min method are used to handle fuzzy goals. A tabu search based solution methodology is used for solution of the proposed models and the results are presented.