Manufacturing cell formation in the case of multimanufacturing processes

The determination of a good decomposition of a manufacturing system into manufacturing cells, when various manufacturing processes are available for each type of product, is addressed. A simple twofold algorithm is proposed. The first part of the algorithm aims at defining the proportion of each product type to manufacture, using each of the available manufacturing processes. The result is a mono-manufacturing process problem, i.e a problem which consists of finding a good decomposition of a manufacturing system into cells when only one manufacturing process is available for each type of product. The second part of the algorithm uses an approach previously presented by the authors (1989) to solve the mono-manufacturing process problem. Also presented is a numerical example to illustrate the approach