Realigning research objectives in cellular manufacturing system design: a user's perspective

Abstract

Designing appropriate cells is thefirst step towards configuring a cellular manufacturing system (CMS). During the last three decades of research numerous algorithms have been developed to solve this problem. However, there is a concern of the wideninggap between research and practice. This paper seeks to provide an understanding of the reasons for this. A scrutiny of over two hundred and seventy five research papers written during the last thirty years suggests that increasingly C M S design research has not been able to adequately satisjij user requirements. Several new directions for future research in the area of C M S design has been proposed to correct this anomaly. These include , re-examining the notion offocus as applied to C M S design, developing eficient solution procedures to handle large problem sizes and dificult to handle data and problem structures and eforts to improve the portability of research to practice.