Rapid Design Technology for Manufacturing Cells

A solution consisting of clustering techniques and heuristic algorithm is presented for the rapid design of manufacturing cells.The methodology considered the practical aspects,such as operation time,operation sequence,production volume,machine capacity,due date of order factors based on alternative process routing and multiple machine types available for operation etc.With the aim of minimum machining time,optimization load balance and minimum number of inter-cell movements,an algorithm which includes three stages is constructed.The first step is the construction of the machine cell based on clustering techniques.The process of resources configuration optimization is put forward by using constraint theory and a method to define and solve bottlenecks was proposed.Followed by the step to achieve the cell utilization balance with the technology of heuristic algorithm.The part family and machine group is finally derived.The application of a practical problem shows the efficiency of this approach.