Title: An improved clustering heuristic in cellular manufacturing systems

Authors: Arindam Majumder; Dipak Laha

Addresses: Mechanical Engineering Department, National Institute of Technology, Agartala, India ' Department of Mechanical Engineering, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India

Abstract: This paper presents a construction heuristic in cellular manufacturing systems with the objective of maximising grouping efficacy. The proposed method is derived from three criteria, namely, Pearson correlation coefficient, the concentration of operations for a particular machine cell pair or a part family pair, and the density of operations for a particular machine-part cell comprising a machine cell and a part family. The proposed method consists of two phases. In the first phase, the machine-groups and part-families are constructed using Pearson correlation coefficient clustering technique. The second phase involves in selecting the machine-groups and part-families to build the respective machine-part cells to cluster machines and parts into the corresponding machine-groups and part families for the cellular manufacturing problem. The exhaustive computational results based on a set of different benchmark problem instances demonstrate that the proposed method is relatively superior to some well-known state-of-the-art methods.

Keywords: cellular manufacturing; group technology; grouping efficacy; construction heuristic; correlation coefficient; concentration of operations; density of operations; optimisation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJOR.2024.142253

International Journal of Operational Research, 2024 Vol.51 No.2, pp.189 - 224

Received: 02 Jul 2021
Accepted: 04 Dec 2021
Published online: 16 Oct 2024 *

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