Produtividade e flexibilidade dos sistemas de produção: proposta de uma meta-heurística busca tabu para a formação de células de manufatura

Abstract

In an increasingly competitive market, production management is a very important factor for the success of an industry. Through it seeks to organize to save the way production environment costs and production time, without loss of quality. The Cellular Manufacturing emerged as an important contribution to industries that seek competitive advantage in low scale production and high product mix (job-shop system) to meet an increasingly demanding market and survive in the current competitive scenario. The Cellular Manufacturing, part of the philosophy of Group Technology, seeks to group machines and parts in independent manufacturing cells through its similarity. However, the Manufacturing Cell Formation Problem is a challenging task that requires techniques to reconfigure production systems effectively and in a timely manner, minimizing lead times, inventory, costs, resource sharing and to respond quickly to market needs. Faced with this complexity, this paper aims to generate a model for Manufacturing Cell Formation, optimization of production processes and reduction of production losses. Starting at a large literature search for understanding of the subject, we built a Tabu Search meta-heuristic model that, through six neighborhoods structures, seeks to maximize Grouping Efficacy in sets of machines and parts. The model architecture is described and presents all the details of the algorithm. Several experiments that enabled the comparison of strategies, parameters, and the finding of conflicts in relation to decision variables were analyzed. The first stage of the experimentation process started from different parameters combinations to find the configuration that best meets the algorithm. Provided with the parameters defined in step 1, we started the step 2, where tests were performed in 35 instances of the problem. Later to validate the model, in step 3, the solutions were compared to studies in the literature for Manufacturing Cell Formation Problem. The results presented are satisfactory, but it is noteworthy, that there is much to be studied for building an effective model for the problem since, so far, there is not a model that overcomes all the results from literature and market expectations.