Decision support system design and development for cellular manufacturing: An application in aviation industry

Today, cellular production systems have become inevitable for companies that produce on order and have a wide variety of products. However, reasons such as fluctuating customer orders, the existence of alternative routes, and the formation of bottleneck machines reduce the efficiency of the cells created in the first place. In this study, a decision support system has been developed that aims to minimize the traffic value between cells by considering alternative routes, machine capacities and customer demands. The developed decision support system is called HAP (Cell Assignment Problem) and coded using Excel VBA (Visual Basic for Applications). HAP has three modules. Its model management module offers a two-stage solution: selecting routes and creating cells. In the first step, the selection of the routes is formulated as a linear programming problem and solved by the branch-and-bound algorithm. In the second stage, the creation of cells is solved using the intercellular traffic minimization method. By minimizing intercellular traffic, it is aimed to avoid intercellular transportation costs and non-value-added operations. HAP experimented on a company operating in the aerospace and defense industry. The results obtainted before and after HAP used are compared. For comparison the efficiency metrics used are the global efficiency, the group technology efficiency, the inter-cell traffic, the number of out-of-cell operations and the number of parts visiting another cell. Our HAP outperformed the current cell designs for each efficiency metric.