On the characterization and measure of machine cells in group technology

Group technology plays an important role in the design of an automated manufacturing system. The ideal situation is to partition the machines into machine cells and the parts into part families so that each machine cell together with the part family for the cell is independent of the rest of the system. We will give a characterization of the independent cells for an arbitrary manufacturing system. An efficient algorithm to identify these independent cells will also be discussed. An effective policy for subcell formation (not necessarily independent) from larger cells will also be discussed. Computational results show that our algorithms always obtain solutions with higher grouping efficiency compared with some of the existing algorithms. We also discuss the effectiveness of grouping efficiency as a measure for group technology.