SUMMARY OF AN APPROACH TO THE DESIGN

OF A HYBRID ORGANISATION OF WORKSHOP

INTO FUNCTIONAL LAYOUT AND GROUP
TECHNOLOGY CELLS
FRANK VIHUIER & HENRI PIERREVAL

SUBMITTED TO: DR.ANDRIYA NARSHIMHULU

SUBMITTED BY: ANUBHAV SHARMA (2019PPE6009)
 • Introduction
Manufacturing systems generally can be of two types I.e. GT cells or Functional. Cell formation is
structuring of manufacturing systems in a certain manner to increase efficiency, but this grouping of
certain machines in cells can be less efficient in some cases. Also, in certain cases it may be possible that
formation of cells is useful in some aspect and continuing in functional manner in some other aspect.

So, here hybrid system is being discussed and different approach to imply in that. A Hybrid System is
that which combine manufacturing cells, as defined in GT-cells and functional cells (F-cells).

“Harhalakis et al. (1996) define a hybrid system as a system composed of cells and individual machines
(F-cells are not considered) and minimize the traffic between all the cells using a Simulated Annealing
approach.”

The article discusses the criteria to distinguish between GT-cells and F-cells. In the article the problem
with Hybrid System and how to tackle the problem by an evolutionary programming method with an
example.

• Desired Features of a Hybrid System

A hybrid manufacturing system to be a workshop that contains both F-cells and GT-cells in coexistence.
The GT-cell offer many advantages like simplification of material flow, reduced work-in-process
inventory, simplified scheduling and increased workers satisfaction and productivity but still some
people avoid to implement this technique because of the possible consequences of future possible
changes in their production and a few advantages that F-cell provide such as possibility to share tools.

The hybrid organization suggested in this article aims at regrouping parts that will be considered as
stable enough in GT-cells and the other parts will be processed in F-cells, hence trying to combine the
advantages of both GT-cells as well as F-cells.

• Problem Formulation
In this work, it is considered that the number of GT cells is not known at the beginning of the algorithm.
And the number of F-cells is known since the partition must contain one and only one F-cell for each
type of machine. The problem identified in the article consists of finding a hybrid manufacturing system
that is a good trade-off between functional layout and GT layout. The effectiveness of GT-cell depends
on the parts’ routes used in the workshop, and secondly on how the different groups of machines are
defined.

In formulation of solution to this problem each part has been given one route and then different groups
of machines are well defined. Time constraint for each machine in workshop is also been kept in mind
for selecting the right route. Here the basic aim was to process the stable parts in the GT-cells and the
non-stable parts in F-cells. The parts are segregated into three categories as Stable Parts, Average Parts,
Non-Stable Parts. Cost of operation is also taken into account for segregating the parts into Stable, Non-
Stable or Average Parts.

Desired Path

In the article different equations are formulated for following problems:

− The total amount of work needed for machine mj is the sum of the amount needed by each
part.
− An equation to minimize the cost after computing the sum of all the costs for all machines for
the workshop.
− An equation that maximizes the average of similarity coefficients between all the couples of
machines belonging to the GT-cell. Similarity coefficient is used to calculate if two machines
should be in same GT-cell.

• An evolutionary programming approach

The evolutionary programming method used in the article to solve the problem is majorly because there
is no crossover operator, and all individuals are parents, without any previous evaluation.

The process is divided in four parts that are: Representation of solutions, Mutation, Constraints,
Evaluation and Selection.

The solution is represented by a string, which is divided in two parts. The first part code the set of routes
and the second codes the partition of set of machines. The offspring of population of solution is
obtained by systematic duplication and mutation. Further the probability tools are used to select
optimum solution. Another objective to minimize the constraint is defined by an equation.

For evaluation and selection SPEA algorithm (a multi criterion selection strategy). Selection is based on
binary tournaments: two solutions are randomly picked out of the union of the Pareto set and of the
population, and only the best one survives. Elitism I.e. selecting the survivors the best solution is used.

The final algorithm is given in pseudo code.

Further a practical example with specific defined sample size to demonstrate the efficiency.
 • Conclusion
In this paper an approach for Hybrid system is been proposed that favors group technology cells for
processing the most stable parts and F-cells for Non-stable parts because of the flexibility provided by
later cell. One major aspect of using evolutionary approach is that it uses a population of solutions,
which offers interesting possibilities to handle several criteria in the optimization search.

For further work a hint is provided towards improving the performance of the optimization search.

Reference: To link to this article:

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09511920310001593092