Cell formation with fuzzy linguistic inputs and rule-based cell scheduling

For cellular manufacturing, we consider a representation method for fuzzy numbers and fuzzy operations in cell formation method in which characteristic features of each part are given as fuzzy linguistic values. Then we propose a rule-based scheduling method that schedules the classified parts in the obtained formulated cell. We use a decision tree to acquire rules among the generated instance schedules. The acquired rules are used for flow-shop scheduling in a cell.