Production planning and worker assignment in a dynamic virtual cellular manufacturing system

Author(s):  
Elnaz Nikoofarid ◽  
Amin Aalaei
Author(s):  
Shima Shafiee-Gol ◽  
reza kia ◽  
Reza Tavakkoli-Moghaddam ◽  
Mohammad Kazemi ◽  
Mehdi A. Kamran

In this paper, to integrate the decisions of parts scheduling, Material Requirement Planning (MRP), Production Planning (PP) and Transportation Planning (TP) for designing a Cellular Manufacturing System (CMS) under a dynamic environment, a Mixed-Integer Nonlinear Programming (MINLP) mathematical model is formulated. The proposed mathematical model integrates extensive coverage of significant manufacturing characteristics in designing a CMS to be implemented in a three-layer supply chain. The considered features include markets demands, heterogeneous vehicles, raw materials requirements planning, parts due dates, cell size limits, machines capacity, intra/inter cell material handling time/cost, transportation time/cost, operation time, alternative processing routes in addition to the main decisions of parts scheduling, PP, TP and dynamic cell formation. Also, some novel characteristics are incorporated based on a three-layer supply chain that make the presented model remarkable respect to the literature including 1) In the first layer, planning the orders of raw materials with different lead times and usage coefficients is performed, 2) In the second layer, decisions of dynamic cell formation and parts scheduling are made, and 3) In the third layer, optimal vehicles are selected as a generalized fixed-charge TP based on transportation time and cost to satisfy multi-markets with different demand volumes. The components in the objective function to be minimized include total costs of holding the parts inventories in the markets, backorders, tardiness, transportation of the parts from the plant to the markets, purchase of raw materials, keeping raw materials in the plant warehouse, intercellular/intracellular movements and machine relocation. An illustrative numerical example is solved by the CPLEX solver to illustrate the achievements obtained by the incorporated characteristics in the integrated model. Furthermore, a sensitivity analysis is performed to assess the effects of important parameters on the model performance. Since the proposed model is NP-hard, a Simulated Annealing (SA) algorithm is improved by an elaborately-designed matrix-based chromosome representation is applied to represent all decision variables, as well as a sequential procedure generating initial solutions. Several test problems either generated randomly or taken from the literature with various sizes are solved and the results are compared with the solutions gained using CPLEX solver. The comparisons results show that the designed SA is capable of evolving optimal or near-optimal solutions with reasonable relative gaps in a computationally satisfactory manner.


Author(s):  
H. Rezazadeh ◽  
M. Ghazanfari ◽  
S. J. Sadjadi ◽  
Mir.B. Aryanezhad ◽  
A. Makui

The concept of virtual cellular manufacturing system (VCMS) is finding acceptance among researchers as an extension to group technology. In fact, in order to realize benefits of cellular manufacturing system in the functional layout, the VCMS creates provisional groups of resources (machines, parts and workers) in the production planning and control system. This paper develops a mathematical model to design the VCMS under a dynamic environment with a more integrated approach where production planning, system reconfiguration and workforce requirements decisions are incorporated. The advantages of the proposed model are as follows: considering the operations sequence, alternative process plans for part types, machine timecapacity, worker time‐capacity, cross training, lot splitting, maximal cell size, balanced workload for cells and workers. An efficient linear programming embedded particle swarm optimization algorithm is used to solve the proposed model. The algorithm searches over the 0‐1 integer variables and for each 0‐1 integer solution visited; corresponding values of integer variables are determined by solving a linear programming sub‐problem using the simplex algorithm. Numerical examples show that the proposed method is efficient and effective in searching for near optimal solutions.


2018 ◽  
Vol 2018 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Lang Wu ◽  
Fulin Cai ◽  
Li Li ◽  
Xianghua Chu

Cross-trained worker assignment has become increasingly important for manufacturing efficiency and flexibility in cellular manufacturing system because of the recent increase in labor cost. Researchers mainly focused on assigning skilled workers to tasks for favorable capacity or cost. However, few of them have recognized the need for skill level enhancement through cross-training to avoid excessive training, especially for workload balance across multiple cells. This study presents a new mathematical programming model aimed at minimum training and maximum workload balance with economical labor utilization, to address the worker assignment problem with a cross-training plan spanning multiple cells. The model considers the trade-off between training expenditure and workload balance to achieve a more flexible solution based on decision-maker’s preference. Considering the computational complexity of the problem, the classical swarm intelligence optimizers, i.e., particle swarm optimization (PSO) and artificial bee colony (ABC), are implemented to search the problem landscape. To improve the optimization performance, a superior tracking ABC with an augmented information sharing strategy is designed to address the problem. Ten benchmark problems are employed for numerical experiments. The results indicate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed models as well as the developed algorithms.


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