Effective two-phase p-median approach for the balanced cell formation in the design of cellular manufacturing system

In this paper, we present an effective two-phase p-median approach for the balanced cell formation (CF) in the design of cellular manufacturing system. In phase 1, the p-median mathematical model of machine CF, which adopts a linear integer programming formulation, is developed. Our formulation uses a new similarity coefficient based on the generalised nonbinary part-machine incidence matrix (PMIM) which incorporates realistic manufacturing aspects such as setup time, processing time, operation sequences and lot size of parts and duplicate machine types. In phase 2, a systematic part assignment procedure based on the new classification scheme of part types is established in pursuit of balancing the workload among machine cells. New efficiency measures for evaluating the quality of the binary and nonbinary PMIM-based block diagonal solutions are proposed to judge the degree of cell load imbalance. Computational experiments with moderately intermediate-sized data-sets selected from the literature show effectiveness of our two-phase p-median approach for the balanced CF.