Mixed Zero-One Programming for Cell Formation Group Technology

This study is devoted to the cell formation problems in cellular manufacturing systems. Starting point of this study is a recent paper of Mahdavi et. al. (2007) which takes into consideration only a few factors of production systems. Further three mixed zero-one integer programming models are suggested. These models can be used for particular cases in which all the necessary information is available. Besides the new model, other main contribution of this study is the computational analysis of the models. Mahdavi et al. (2007) only provided two examples which are 6 parts / 6 machines and 10 parts / 10 machines problems. In this research randomly generated problems are used with the sizes from 6 parts / 6 machines to 20 parts / 20 machines. A real life problem (Jerald et. al. 2006), which has 43 parts and 16 machines is also analyzed. The results show that the new models are providing better solution in most of the cases and at the same time, the run times of the proposed models are shorter.

Keywords:

Cellular Manufacturing Systems , Cell Formation , Mathematical modeling , mixed Integer Programming , Linearization