Measures of grouping efficiency in cellular manufacturing systems

Grouping efficiency is a measure of goodness of machine-part groups in cellular manufacturing systems. This paper briefly presents a critical review of existing grouping measures, introduces a new measure called ‘doubly weighted grouping efficiency measure’ and evaluates its relative performance compared with other existing measures. Here, special emphasis is given evaluation of the goodness of clustering solutions in block-diagonalization of machine-part incidence matrix. In order to provide information on the measures, results are collected and compiled from discretely reported sources and are reported both descriptively and quantitatively. Categorization and generalization of these measures are made to use them for goodness of clustering. In order to overcome a number of drawbacks in the previously known measures, a new doubly weighted grouping efficiency measure is presented and its performance is demonstrated with respect to several efficiency measures.