Abstract
A cellular manufacturing system, which consists of machine groups and parts families, is one of methods to cope with multi-product small sized production. In this paper, a heuristic procedure is presented for manufacturing cell formation considering operation sequence of parts. Manufacturing formation methods proposed before, usually, minimize intercell parts movements or product of the part movements and intercell distance. But the intercell distance is determined by cell layout. Also, a decrease of intercell part movements lead to an increase of intracell part movements. So, a single-line layout is assumed to estimate the part movements. Then, machine groups are determined to minimize the total movements of the parts, and part families are assigned to the appropriate machine groups.
