Machine cell formation for production management in cellular manufacturing systems

The formation of machine-part families is an important task in the design of cellular manufacturing systems. Manufacturing cell grouping has the effect of reducing material handling cost and work in process. Among the many methods utilized in machine cells formation, the similarity coefficient method is most widely used. Production sequence and product volumes, if incorporated properly in determining the machine cells, can enhance the quality of solutions and reduce the number of intercellular movements. Measures for cell formation based on operations sequence utilizing ordinal production data are few and have many limitations, such as counting the number of the trips for each individual part instead of counting the weights of the batches. A new ordinal production data similarity coefficient based on the sequence of operations and the batch size of the parts is introduced. Furthermore, a new clustering algorithm for machine cell formation is proposed. The new similarity measure showed more sensitivity to the intercellular movements and the clustering algorithm showed better machine grouping.