Heuristic approaches for part assignment in cell formation

Since the cell formation problem is considered to be a complex and multi-criteria problem, then no single algorithm can provide all the promised benefits. To gain more benefits of the cell formation, three heuristic procedures are developed in this paper to give the designer more flexibility to generate cells. Given a cell formation solution, the heuristics are designed to assign parts to the cells in the presence of alternative process plans, multiple alternative (parallel) machines, or when processing times are taken into consideration.