Duplication of machines and subcontracting of parts in the presence of alternative cell locations

In this paper a polynomial programming model is presented to deal with the processes of machine duplication and part subcontracting in the presence of alternative cell locations and maximum number of machines that can be assigned to a cell. As the model formulated for the problem can be proven strongly NP-hard, a tabu search-based heuristic solution algorithm is presented for solving problems that have industrial merit. A simple example is solved to demonstrate the applicability of the algorithm at two different budgetary levels. The example further demonstrates that alternative cell locations indeed have a significant impact in dealing with the processes of machine duplication and part subcontracting in cellular manufacturing systems.