A two‐phase procedure for cell formation in manufacturing systems

This work addresses the problem of specification of cellular manufacturing systems (CMS), identifying the machine cells and the respective part families, as well as considering some constraints usually met during the CMS’ installation. For this, we developed a heuristic procedure consisting of two phases, where in the first phase, a version of the breadth‐first search algorithm is used to allocate parts to the machines, in a way not to violate the processing capacity of the machines; and in the second phase, a genetic algorithm is used to identify the machine cells and the respective part families.