A comparative study for designing Cellular Manufacturing Systems with assembly aspects by a new approach

The Cellular Manufacturing Systems (CMS) design problem with presence of assembly operations; as in the real manufacturing environments, and so, because of the parent/child relationships for the final products, is very different to what it has been common in the literature. This paper describes the CMS design in above situation and shows its differences with common situation by comparative analysis. For this purpose, a new mathematical approach for modeling the CMS design problem is presented to surmount the drawbacks of similar researches and to fill the current gap. Then, the computational results by solving an illustrative example are evaluated and comparative outcomes are used to demonstrate the validity of proposed approach.