Abstract

Facility layout which is the arrangement of facilities in the shop-floor has a great impact on the performance of manufacturing systems, while in volatile manufacturing systems; any kinds of change can degrade the performance of the system and leads to inefficiency of the layout. In this paper, a new mathematical model for layout problems in cellular manufacturing systems has been proposed that considers the stochastic nature of demand. The model minimizes the total material handling cost (both inter-cell and intra-cell material handling cost), and it is solved by two solution approaches, Lingo optimization software, and an enumeration method. The obtained results show the validity of the mathematical model.

Key words: Cellular manufacturing, facility layout, stochastic model, enumeration, Lingo.