A Hamiltonian Path approach to reordering the part-machine matrix for cellular manufacturing

The formation of machine and part groups is a central issue in the design of cellular manufacturing systems. The part-machine incidence matrix has formed the basis of several techniques for cell formation. In this paper, the authors propose formulating machine and part orderings as a Hamiltonian Path Problem. Similarity coefficients are used to form a distance measure for machines and parts. The resulting solutions are shown to be better than those obtained from binary clustering on a set of test problems.