Development of virtual cellular manufacturing systems for SMEs Available to Purchase

The concept of virtual cellular manufacturing systems (VCMS) is finding acceptance among researchers and practitioners as an extension to group technology. This paper is related to a research work which resulted in designing and developing VCMS, which by virtue of its abilities proves to be attractive to manufacturing organisations fitting into the category of SMEs. VCMS consists of enterprise modeller (EM), cell design manager (CDM), cell operation manager (COM), simulator (SIM), performance evaluator (PE) and report generator (REP). The “cell design manager” is a very important constituent of the VCMS, as this module helps to generate a number of cell configurations using different algorithms. A new algorithm styled as “Better alternative to ROC (BETROC)”, which possesses many distinct features to generate a number of alternative solutions, has been developed and reported in this paper.