Ergonomic cell design and modeling in furniture industry according to cellular manufacturing system

Today, the demands on products vary due to the economic, geographic and cultural differences of consumers. At the same time, this diversity has shortened the product life-cycles. Cellular Manufacturing (CM) system is an important application, which enables the production systems to quickly adapt to the diversity of consumer expectations and short product life-cycles.There are two big problems in CM system design. The first and the most important one is the formation (part families, machine cells) of cells. The second problem is the elimination of the exceptional elements (exceptional parts, bottleneck machine) of the CM system.When the existing literature on the CM system design is examined, two considerable deficiencies have been observed. The first deficiency observed is that over time production alternative is not taken into account with exceptional part elimination in the existing methods (subcontracting, intercellular transfer and bottleneck machine duplication) used for the elimination of exceptional elements. The second important deficiency is that the ergonomic factors are not considered in the cell formation.In this study, a noise factored ergonomic cell design model was suggested to overcome the mentioned deficiencies observed in the relevant literature. Suggested model is a 0-1 mixed integer programming model, which aims to minimize the exceptional element elimination costs while undertaking the exceptional element elimination and cell formation problems together.Three different models are developed by the expansion of the suggested model with respect to the requirements of the production system (panel furniture production) in practice. Developed models and the problems generated by using real production systems data are solved by GAMS/CPLEX 10.2 package program.Obtained solution results are interpreted and appropriate demand quantities and cell formations are suggested for the system in practice.It is observed that, as the proposed models undertake the cell formation and exceptional element elimination problems along with ergonomic factors for CM system design problem that can be faced in real life, they are efficient and useful tools both for the furniture industry and other branches of industry.