Abstract: In the existing cell formation methods for cellular manufacturing systems, often it does not consider operator configuration and product sequencing. However, for laborintensive manufacturing systems, it is vitally important to determine the number of operators for each workstation in a cell. In this paper, cell formation problem is studied for laborintensive manufacturing systems with operator assignment and product sequencing being considered. After an integer programming model is formulated for the problem, a threephase heuristic solution method is proposed. In the first phase, the products are assigned into machines such that machine cells are formed based on the product similarity. In the second phase, operators are assigned to workstations by using the longest processing time priority rule. In the third phase, Palmer heuristic algorithm is used to sequence the product types. An example is used to illustrate the application of the proposed method.

Key words: cell formation, product similarity, integer programming, heuristic