• Journal of Korean Society of Industrial and Systems Engineering
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• v.36 no.1
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• pp.24-35
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• 2013

A cell formation approach based on cluster analysis is developed for the configuration of manufacturing cells. Cell formation, which is to group machines and parts into machine cells and the associated part families, is implemented to add the flexibility and efficiency to manufacturing systems. In order to develop an efficient clustering procedure, this paper proposes a cluster analysis-based approach developed by incorporating and modifying two cluster analysis methods, a hierarchical clustering and a non-hierarchical clustering method. The objective of the proposed approach is to minimize intercellular movements and maximize the machine utilization within clusters. The proposed approach is tested on the cell formation problems and is compared with other well-known methodologies available in the literature. The result shows that the proposed approach is efficient enough to yield a good quality solution no matter what the difficulty of data sets is, ill or well-structured.

• Journal of Korean Society of Industrial and Systems Engineering
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• v.27 no.3
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• pp.7-13
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• 2004

In this paper, machine cell formation problem is discussed. To reflect precisely actual manufacturing situations such as routing sequences, production quantities, and machining (or operation) characteristics, a new network presentation (or the problem is proposed. It is formulated as a simple 0-1 quadratic programming model with linear constraints. Then, the model is converted into a 0-1 integer programming model using a variable transformation technique. Lastly, some computational results are presented.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 1997.04a
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• pp.432-437
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• 1997

In this paper, Fuzzy ART which is one of the competitive learing neural networks is applied to machine-part cell formation problem. A large matrix and varios types of machine-part incidence matrices, especially including bottle-neck machines, bottle-neck parts, parts shared by several cells, and machines shared by several cells are used to test the performannce of Fuzzy ART neural network as a cell formation algorithm. The result shows Fuzzy ART neral network can be efficiently applied to machine-part cell formation problem which are large, and/or have much imperfection as exceptions, bottle-neck machines, and bottle-neck parts.

• IE interfaces
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.20-29
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• 2001

This paper presents a concurrent design approach that deals with manufacturing cell formation and cellular layout in Cellular Manufacturing System. Manufacturing cell formation is to group machines into machine cells dedicated to manufacture of part families, and cellular layout problem determines layout of the manufacturing cells within shop and layout of the machines within a cell. In this paper, a concurrent approach for design of machine cell and cellular layout is developed considering manufacturing parameters such as alternative process plans, alternative machines, production volume and processing time of part, and cost per unit time of operation. A mathematical model which minimizes total cost consisting of machine installation cost, machine operating cost, and intercell and intracell movements cost of part is proposed. A hybrid method based on genetic algorithm is proposed to solve the manufacturing cell formation and cellular layout design problem concurrently. The performance of the hybrid method is examined on several problems.

• Korean Management Science Review
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.1-17
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• 1995

The success of cell manufacturing applications in FMS rests on the effective cell formation to maintain the independent relations both between machine cells and between part families. This paper presents an integrated method for concurrent formation of cells and families with no E.E (Exceptional Element) in FMS with alternative routings. To determine the maximum number of cell and family with no E.E, mathematical conditions and properties are derived. New concept of nonsimilarity is introduced for each machine and part based on machine-operation incidence matrix and part-operation incidence matrix. To concurrently form the cells and families, integer programming based mathematical models are developed. For the predetermined number of cell or family, model I is used to identify whether E.E exists or not. Model II forms cells and families considering only nonsimilarity. But model III can consider nonsimilarity and processing times. The proposed method is tested and proved by using numerical examples.

• IE interfaces
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.1-13
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• 1997

The problem of the formation of machine-part cells in FMS is a very important issue at the planning and operating stages of FMS. This problem is inherently a combinatorial optimization problem, proven to be NP-complete(or, NP-hard). Among the several kinds of approaches which have been applied to solve the combinatorial optimization problems, the Simulated Annealing(SA) algorithm, a technique of random search type with a flexibility in generating alternatives, is a powerful problem solving tool. In this paper, the SA algorithm is used to solve machine cell-part family formation problems. The primary purpose of the study is to find the near-optimal solution of machine cell-part family formation problem, whare the product volume and number of operations are prespecified, that can minimize the total material handling cost caused by exceptional elements and intercell moves as much as possible. The results show that the SA algorithm is able to find a near-optimal solution for practical problems of the machine cell-part family formation.

• Journal of the Korean Operations Research and Management Science Society
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• v.26 no.1
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• pp.71-85
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• 2001

This paper considers a cost model for a U-shaped manufacturing cell formation which incorporates a required number of machines and various material flows together under multi-part multi-cell environment. The model is required to satisfy both the specified operation sequence of each part and the total part demand volume, which are considered to derive material handling cost in U-shaped flow line cells. In the model several cost-incurring factors including set-up for batch change-over, processing time for operations of each part, and machine failures are also considered in association with processing load and capacity of each cell. Moreover, a heuristic for a good machine layout in each cell is newly proposed based on the material handling cost of each alternative sequence layout. These all are put together to present an efficient heuristic for the U-shaped independent-cell formation problem, numerical problems are solved to illustrate the algorithm.

• Journal of Korean Society of Industrial and Systems Engineering
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• v.21 no.45
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• pp.329-332
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• 1998

This Paper proposes a mathematical model to solve the cell formation problem with exceptional elements, Exceptional elements are bottleneck machines and exceptional parts that span two or more manufacturing cells. The model suggests whether it is cost-effective to eliminate an EE (by machine duplication or part subcontracting), or whether the intercellular transfer caused by the EE should remain in the cell formation. It provides an optimal solution for resolving the interaction created by EE in the initial cell formation solution. In addition, the model recognizes potentially advantageous mixed strategies ignored by previous approaches.

• Korean Management Science Review
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.157-171
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• 1999

In a increasingly competitive marketplace, the manufacturing companies have no choice but looking for ways to improve productivity to sustain their competitiveness and survive in the industry. Recently cellular manufacturing has been under discussion as an option to be easily implemented without burdensome capital investment. The objective of cellular manufacturing is to realize many aspects of efficiencies associated with mass production in the less repetitive job-shop production systems. The very first step for cellular manufacturing is to group the sets of parts having similar processing requirements into part families, and the equipment needed to process a particular part family into machine cells. The underlying problem to determine the part and machine assignments to each manufacturing cell is called the cell formation. The purpose of this study is to develop a clustering algorithm based on the neural network approach which overcomes the drawbacks of ART1 algorithm for cell formation problems. In this paper, a generalized learning vector quantization(GLVQ) algorithm was devised in order to transform a 0/1 part-machine assignment matrix into the matrix with diagonal blocks in such a way to increase clustering performance. Furthermore, an assignment problem model and a rearrangement procedure has been embedded to increase efficiency. The performance of the proposed algorithm has been evaluated using data sets adopted by prior studies on cell formation. The proposed algorithm dominates almost all the cell formation reported so far, based on the grouping index($\alpha$ = 0.2). Among 27 cell formation problems investigated, the result by the proposed algorithm was superior in 11, equal 15, and inferior only in 1.

• Proceedings of the Korean Operations and Management Science Society Conference
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• 1995.04a
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• pp.122-129
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• 1995

This paper presents a similarity coefficient based approach to the problem of machine-part grouping for cellular manufacturing. The method uses relevant production data such as part type, production volume, routing sequence to make machine cells and part families for cell formation. A new similarity coefficient using weighted factors is introduced and an algorithm for formation of machine cells and part families is developed. A comparative study of two similarity coefficients - Gupta and seifoddini's method and proposed method - is conducted. A software program using TURBO C has been developed to verify the implementation.