Dynamic manufacturing cell formation through market oriented programming

In today's competitive environment, cellular manufacturing is a promising approach providing both the flexibility of job shops and efficiency of flow lines. However, one of the drawbacks of cellular manufacturing and its algorithms is their inability to handle dynamic events, especially dynamic changes in part spectrum. Although there are various efforts in the literature, researchers still could not overcome this problem efficiently. Since handling dynamism with traditional methods is nearly impossible, and the reconfiguration of the cells according to each change is difficult and costly especially in volatile manufacturing systems. In this context, agent based modelling provides opportunities to model dynamism and to obtain efficient solutions. Since it has ability to track and evaluate the real time information if it is implemented successfully. On the other side, virtual cell formation concept provides the opportunity to create manufacturing cells without the reconfiguration. In this thesis study, it is mainly focussed on these modelling approaches to develop a dynamic cellular manufacturing system. And an integrated novel agent based virtual cellular manufacturing approach is developed. The proposed approach enables to realize part family formation, virtual cell formation, and scheduling simultaneously while considering dynamic part demand arrivals. The results are discussed and it is shown that the proposed approach is very effective.