The first stage of designing a cellular manufacturing system (CMS) is to from cells within the system. This cell formation (CF) creates completely independent machine cells, identifies part families, and allocates part families to machine cells in order to minimize operational costs, consisting of machine and material handling costs. Considering this costs makes the CF more realistic. However, the existing cell formation methods assume that all machines are always available. In the real-world situation, manufacturing facilities are subject to deterioration and obsolescence due to malfunction, breakdown, or failure. Machine failure affects the CMS performance by interrupting production activities, especially from the scheduling point of view, in this situation, for timely satisfaction of demands and reduction of work-in-process (WIP) inventories, a principal goal is to increase the system reliability with respect to the failure rate of manufacturing facilities, because of the dynamic nature of production systems , the effects of machine breakdown are different manufacturing situations. This research proposes a mixed-integer nonlinear programming model for designing a cellular manufacturing system that minimizes the total costs of manufacturing operations, machine under-utilization, inter-cell material handling and intra-cell material handling, setup and breakdown with reliability consideration. In general, it is impossible to avoid production interruptions while handling machine breakdowns. In the situation, changing the process road dynamically can provide quick response to meet production requirements. By assuming alternative process plan for operation-part requirements, the concept of the reliable road is extended. In a redundant reliability system with a series-parallel configuration, each reliable route is associated with and operation of a part as a parallel subsystem. This route consists of a number of units or alternative machines allocated to cells in such a way that parts are processed with the maximum reliability for a given period of time. When an alternative machine breaks down, on processed parts are transferred to the next pre-determined machine on the reliable route in order to complete reliable route approach increases the overall system reliability. In this research, an efficient genetic algorithm is proposed to solve the cell formation problem. With reliable road and machine reliability considerations computational experiences form test problem show that the proposed approach is extremely effective and efficient. Finally, the related computational results are reported. Keywords: Cellular Manufacturing System, Series-parallel Redundant Reliability System, Reliable Route, Genetic Algorithm.
