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Cellular facility layout problem: a case of tower manufacturing industry

Ravi Kumar (Department of Management Studies, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, New Delhi, India)
Surya Prakash Singh (Department of Management Studies, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, New Delhi, India)

Management of Environmental Quality

ISSN: 1477-7835

Article publication date: 15 August 2018

Issue publication date: 2 September 2019

406

Abstract

Purpose

In today’s competitive market, product demand and its mix frequently vary due to various uncertainties, which thus imparts the overall manufacturing cost. Furthermore, uncertainties also impart the layout design in manufacturing industries in the long run. Therefore, the layout design needs to capture the possibility of uncertainties, and these uncertainties must be captured while designing the layout of a facility. Hence, an efficient facility layout design minimizes the manufacturing cost and lead time. The purpose of this paper is to propose a cellular layout design for a tower manufacturing industry.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper develops an embedded simulated annealing-based meta-heuristic to solve proposed cellular layout under different scenarios considering single and multi-time periods for tower manufacturing industry. A comparative study is also performed to analyze comparison among static cellular layout, a dynamic cellular layout or a robust stochastic cellular layout for the tower manufacturing industry.

Findings

The current layout of the industry is a process layout. Here, the layout for a tower manufacturing industry is proposed under SCFLP, DCFLP and RSCFLP. The proposed models and solution methodology is tested using six scenarios with different combination of time periods. Lastly, OFV value obtained for all the scenarios is compared, and it is found that RSCFLP outruns other SCFLP and DCFLP for a tower manufacturing industry. Based on the above study, it is also concluded that RSCFLP is an efficient and effective layout in tower manufacturing industry.

Originality/value

The paper proposes a cellular layout design for a tower manufacturing industry. The cellular layout design is found to be preferred over the traditional layout as it reduces material handling cost, manufacturing lead time and hazards. Moreover, it enhances productivity and quality.

Keywords

Citation

Kumar, R. and Singh, S.P. (2019), "Cellular facility layout problem: a case of tower manufacturing industry", Management of Environmental Quality, Vol. 30 No. 6, pp. 1345-1360. https://doi.org/10.1108/MEQ-04-2018-0076

Publisher

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Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2018, Emerald Publishing Limited

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