Effective clustering method for group technology problems: a short communication

Abstract

Cellular manufacturing (CM) has acquired an upward interest of researchers in recent era. The most important problem in designing cellular manufacturing systems is the cell formation (CF), which constructs part families with similar processing requirements and designates machines into machine cells to optimize the production process. This article presents a short research report based on hybrid approach to the CF problem in CM. The proposed approach exploits Pearson’s correlation coefficient and weighted average linkage clustering technique. Thereafter a modified part grouping method is introduced to improve the quality of solutions. The proposed technique is tested on 12 published datasets and the experimental results signify that the proposed method is quite effective for small to medium size problems