Control intelligente

Journal of Theoretical and Applied Information Technology
© 2005 JATIT. All rights reserved. www.jatit.org

MANUFACTURING CELL DESIGN WITH REDUCTION IN SETUP TIME THROUGH GENETIC ALGORITHM
M. MURUGAN 1, V. SELLADURAI 2. 1. SENIOR LECTURER, DEPARTMENT OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING, SRI RAMAKRISHNA ENGINEERING COLLEGE, COIMBATORE, TAMILNADU, INDIA 2. PROFESSOR, DEPARTMENT OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING,COIMBATORE INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY, COIMBATORE, TAMILNADU, INDIA

ABSTRACT Cellular manufacturing emerged as a production strategy capable of solving the problems of complexity and long manufacturing lead times in batch production. The fundamental problem in cellular manufacturing is the formation of product families and machine cells. This paper presents a new approach for obtainingsimultaneous arrangement of part families and machine cells for cellular manufacturing systems. The main feature of the proposed method is, the relevant production data such as process sequences and setup times are taken in to account. It has the ability to select the best solution among the solutions of compactness, group technology efficiency and reducing setup time efficiency for each part beforeattempting to cluster the machines and parts. The formation of part family and machine cell has been treated as a maximization problem according to a defined performance measure ‘β’. A genetic algorithm has been developed for solving the cell formation problem considering the reduction in setup time. The validation has been done based on a real time manufacturing data. This algorithm is written in the‘C’ language on Intel Pentium / PIII compatible system. Keywords: Part family, Machine cell, Setup time, cell formation, genetic algorithm and Performance measure. M.Murugan, Faculuty of Mechanical Engineering, Sri Ramakrishna Engineering College, Coimbatore- 641 022, Tamilnadu, India. Phone: 91-422-2460088,extn. 364, Fax: 91-422-2461089, E-mail: murugan_srec@yahoo.co.in

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Journal of Theoreticaland Applied Information Technology
© 2005 JATIT. All rights reserved. www.jatit.org

1. INTRODUCTION Recent competitive economic situations demand quicker supply of newer products with more innovative functionality to satisfy quickly changing customer requirements. In striving to remain competitive, the concept of Cellular Manufacturing has been extensively employed to the manufacturingsystems. Cellular manufacturing emerged as a production strategy capable of solving the problem of complexity and long manufacturing lead times in batch production systems in the beginning of the 1960s. Burbidge (1979) defined group technology (GT) as an approach to the optimization of work in which the organizational production units are relatively independent groups, each responsible for theproduction of a given family of products. The fundamental problem in cellular manufacturing is the formation of product families and machine cells. Group technology is a principle, which decomposes a global system into several subsystems, which are easier to manage than the entire system. Applied to manufacturing, this principle is the base for the design of production cells. According to Wemmerlov andHyer, the main improvements that can be expected from cellular manufacturing are reductions in throughput time, in material handling, in setup time and improvement of part quality. In essence, the basic information required to solve a CM problem is the Machine-Part Incidence Matrix, which consists of values of 0s and 1s, where 1 in an entry denotes that the corresponding coordinate of a part thatrequires the service of that machine, or otherwise. All CM problems are resolved by manipulating the incidence matrix in a manner such that the grouping of all similar objects is possible. The manipulation of a machine-part incidence matrix is based on, (a) the direct approach and (b) the indirect approach. The direct approach to a CM problem includes those methods in which the grouping of...