Machine grouping in cellular manufacturing

Recent productivity gains enjoyed by Japan and other European countries have prompted more manufacturers from other countries to explore the use of advanced technologies as a means of improving their competitive edge in the world market. This paper presents a brief review of two of these technologies: robotics and group technologies (GT). Various research issues are discussed for each technology together with the strengths and weaknesses of the papers reviewed. As a means of integrating the two technologies, a group technology-based model for selecting robots for manufacturing cells is presented. An appropriate definition of similarity measure for the weighted codes of coding and classification analysis in GT is presented using a robot coding system example. A single linkage clustering algorithm is then proposed for use in finding robot clusters for a manufacturing cell. Finally a numerical example is presented to illustrate the model.