Decision Sciences Journal
Volume 27, Number 3
Summer 1996
A Virtual Cellular Manufacturing Approach to Batch
Production
Vijay R. Kannan
Information & Decision Sciences Department, College of Business,
James Madison University, Harrisonburg, VA 22807
Soumen Ghosh
School of Management, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA
30332-0520
ABSTRACT
In this paper, Virtual Cellular Manufacturing (VCM), an alternative
approach to implementing cellular manufacturing, is investigated.
VCM combines the setup efficiency typically obtained by Group
Technology (GT) cellular manufacturing (CM) systems with the
routing flexibility of a job shop. Unlike traditional CM systems in
which the shop is physically designed as a series of cells,
family-based scheduling criteria are used to form logical cells
within a shop using a process layout. The result is the formation
of temporary, virtual cells as opposed to the more traditional,
permanent, physical cells present in GT systems. Virtual cells
allow the shop to be more responsive to changes in demand and
workload patterns. Production using VCM is compared to production
using traditional cellular and job shop approaches. Results
indicate that VCM yields significantly better flow time and due
date performance over a wide range of common operating conditions,
as well as being more robust to demand variability.
Subject Areas: Cellular Manufacturing, Facility Layout,
Group Technology, Job Shop Scheduling, and Simulation.
|