| Manufacturing Cell Design (MCD) Evolutionary System is a full Prolog system for manufacturing cell design developed based on the paradigm of the evolution. Currently, this artificial system is doing part/product families and cells configurations. This thesis focuses on forming part/product families for a given number of families (f). The objectives of cellular design considered are: minimize the total number of machine types needed for the entire cellular design; Case (1), minimize the total number of machines; Case (2), and minimize the total machine investment; Case (3). Those complex tasks are performed in an iterative manner: (1) Assign parts to families by using evolutionary programming. (2) Repeat step 1 for varying number of families and (3) select the best configuration. Case (3) is more complete approach in the sense that it uses more inputs and produces the minimum cost solution. The configurations with lower number of families produces better results (minimum total cost) except for f = 2. MCD Evolutionary System allows the users perform experimentation with different sizes of manufacturing problems including demand and cost, with diverse "genetic" operators, and different evolution parameter set. Larger population size provides consistency in the solutions, however, as the population size increases, the execution time requirements increase as well. The impact of mutation operator was significant in finding solutions to the manufacturing problems. |
