This paper presents a new method to identify classes during object-oriented software development. The approach uses process mapping and clustering technique for achieving unambiguous transition from requirements to the definition of object-oriented classes. We draw analogy between forming cells in cellular manufacturing and class formation in object-oriented software development and accordingly...

-This paper discusses and reviews a fundamental issue in cellular manufacturing--cell formation. This problem is of strategic and operational importance in that it affects the fundamental structure and the overall layout of a cellular manufacturing system. We first provide a comprehensive mathematical formulation of the cell formation problem and then propose a methodology-based classification ...

Virtual Cellular Manufacturing Systems (VCMSs) are based on a highly flexible manufacturing concept designed to improve the performance of classical Cellular Manufacturing Systems (CMSs) and job shop manufacturing environments by creating virtual grouping of the resources temporarily in the production planning and control system. In an environment with fluctuating demand and unpredictable parts...

For each industrial, lean manufacturing is “The method” to improve productivity and reduce cost. One of the tools for lean is cellular manufacturing. This technique reduces the factory to several small entities, which are easier to manage. The main difficulty of the cellular manufacturing is the creation of these small entities called cells. When the flexibility is used during the production pr...

Small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) have gained competitive advantage by using Just-in-Time, Total Quality Management, and Information Technology. Cellular Manufacturing (CM) has received less attention from SMEs. This paper reports the findings of a case study of the application of Group Technology in an SME. A framework for the design and implementation of Cellular Manufacturing Systems ...

In past decade, new approaches to cell formation for cellular manufacturing systems was developed and applied. To be specific, Genetic Algorithm, Simulated Annealing, Ants colony systems, Particle Swarm Optimization, and Tabu search etc... are in this paradigm. When the implementation stage knocks the door, there is a great deal whether it can be applied in reality or not. Keeping this in mind,...

Cellular manufacturing system design has received much attention for the past three decades. The design process involves decisions on (i) cell formation, (ii) cell layout, and (iii) layout of cells on the shop floor. These decisions should be addressed jointly, if full benefits of cellular manufacturing are to be realised. However, due to the complexity of the problem, most researchers addresse...

Cellular manufacturing emerged as a production strategy capable of solving the certain problems of complexity and long manufacturing lead times in batch production. The fundamental problem in cellular manufacturing is the formation of product families and machine cells. This paper presents a new approach for obtaining machine cells and product families. The approach combines a local search heur...

One of the crucial steps in the design of a cellular manufacturing system is the cell formation problem, which involves grouping the parts into part families and machines into manufacturing cells, so that parts with similar processing requirements are manufactured within the same cell. When modelling this problem it is usually assumed that the specific machine in which each operation is carried...

Group technology (GT) is a useful way to increase productivity with high quality in flexible manufacturing systems. Cell formation (CF) is a key step in GT. It is used to design a good cellular manufacturing system that uses the similarity measure between parts and machines so that it can identify part families and machine groups. Recently, fuzzy clustering has been applied in GT because the fu...