An Effective Machine-Part Grouping Algorithm to Construct Manufacturing Cells

The machine-part cell formation problem consists of creating machine cells and their corresponding part families with the objective of minimizing the inter-cell and intra-cell movement while maximizing the machine utilization. This article demonstrates a hybrid clustering approach for the cell formation problem in cellular manufacturing that conjoins Sorenson’s similarity coefficient based method to form the production cells. Computational results are shown over the test datasets obtained from the past literature. The hybrid technique is shown to outperform the other methods proposed in literature and including powerful soft computing approaches such as genetic algorithms, genetic programming by exceeding the solution quality on the test problems. Keywords—production cell formation; group technology; hybrid clustering analysis; similarity coefficient;