A priority rule based heuristic for virtual cellular manufacturing system with energy consumption

This paper proposes an integrated virtual cellular manufacturing system model and develops a novel priority rule based heuristic to solve it. The model can simultaneously group workstations, schedule virtual cells, and select energy consumption levels. On one hand, if managers prefer the physical proximity of machines in certain virtual cell, the material handling cost in the cell can be reduced. However, the distances among machines in other virtual cells are probably large, which may give rise to greater material handling cost. On the other hand, if a virtual cell for certain product type has priority to be created, the backorder cost of the product type can be decreased or even avoided. Nevertheless, the virtual cells for other product types perhaps delay creation because of the occupation of necessary resources, which may lead to higher backorder cost of other product types. In addition, managers can choose high energy consumption level of machine to expedite production with expectation of less backorder cost but at the expense of more energy consumption cost possibly.