Design of Manufacturing Cells Pharmaceutical Factory

Cellular manufacturing is an important tool for manufacturing firms which leads to better productivity, focused and specialized manufacturing process. To utilize this important tool, the machines have to be grouped into cells. This work is related to using cellular manufacturing in a pharmaceutical factory with alternative routing. This adds more choices in the decision making process and presses for a better tool to make optimal selection. Several objectives may be considered to improve the productivity objectives such as the total number of exits and planning and scheduling robustness related objectives like bottleneck utilization and load balance between and within the alternative routes. Analytical hierarchical process (AHP) is used as a multi-objective decision making process to evaluate the best scenario amongst generated using simulation as a tool for modeling and evaluating the output for each scenario. Three customer case studies were considered with different preferences and the AHP evaluated the best scenario to fit these preferences. The best scenario can vary from one customer preferences to another but for the current system it turned out to be the same choice.