An algorithm to find the number of parallel stations for optimal cell scheduling

This paper focuses on cell scheduling problem in AVON Lomalinda Inc., a jewelry manufacturing company. However, the proposed algorithm can be used in other industries with similar operating conditions as well. The most important feature of the problem under study is that there are more operators allocated to the cells than the number of operations thus making it inevitable to have parallel stations. An optimizing algorithm to find the number of parallel stations with preassigned operations is suggested and later used to find the best common cell size for the entire plant.