Research of manufacturing cell design problems is still pertinent today, because new manufacturing strategies, such as mass customization, call for further improvement of the fundamental performance of cellular manufacturing systems. The main scope of this article is to find the optimal cell design(s) from alternative design(s) by multi-criteria evaluation. For this purpose, alternative design solutions are mutually compared by using the selected performance criteria, namely operational complexity, production line balancing rate, and makespan. Then, multi-criteria decision analysis based on the analytic hierarchy process method is used to show that two more-cell solutions better satisfy the determined criteria of manufacturing cell design performance than three less-cell solutions. The novelty of this research approach refers to the use of the modification of Saaty’s scale for the comparison of alternatives in pairs based on the objective assessment of the designs. Its benefit lies in the exactly enumerated values of the selected criteria, according to which the points from the mentioned scale are assigned to the alternatives.
As mass customization becomes more pervasive in many sectors, researcher needs to update traditional approaches to optimization of critical performance and design parameters in order to help companies in their effort to implement this strategy. In general, implementation of mass customization from manufacturing perspective is frequently focused on shortening cycle times, reducing production cost, and increasing throughput rate of parts. In this paper, process structure modularity impact on manufacturing lead times and throughput rates is explored. An important precondition to explore these relationships is awareness that process modularity is conceptualized and quantified in an appropriate way. For this purpose, two independent modularity measures were employed to provide more reliable assessment of this system property. The relationships were investigated on the basis of simulation experiments using deterministic models of alternative process structures. The results from the experiments showed that there are strong correlations between process modularity and manufacturing lead time, as well as between process modularity and throughput rate.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.