Cell Formation for Cellular Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems with Alternative Routing

Cellular reconfigurable manufacturing systems (CRMS) are designed to deal with dynamic demand. This paper tries to optimize cell formation decision in CRMSs with alternative routing. A mixed integer nonlinear programming model is developed to simultaneously optimize cell formation, equipment configuration, and product mix plan. The objective is to maximize profit. The linearization methods are proposed and then the model is solved by Gurobi. Numerical experiment and sensitive analysis are conducted to show the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed approach.