• Journal of Korean Institute of Industrial Engineers
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• v.31 no.1
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• pp.1-9
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• 2005

This paper proposes the heuristic algorithm for the generalized GT problems to consider the restrictions which are given the number of machine cell and maximum number of machines in machine cell as well as minimum number of machines in machine cell. This approach is split into two phase. In the first phase, we use the similarity coefficient which proposes and calculates the similarity values about each pair of all machines and sort these values descending order. If we have a machine pair which has the largest similarity coefficient and adheres strictly to the constraint about birds of a different feather (BODF) in a machine cell, then we assign the machine to the machine cell. In the second phase, we assign parts into machine cell with the smallest number of exceptional elements. The results give a machine-part grouping. The proposed algorithm is compared to the Modified p-median model for machine-part grouping.

• Journal of Korean Institute of Industrial Engineers
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.705-718
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• 1996

A similarity coefficient based algorithm is proposed to solve the machine cells and part families formation problem in group technology. Similarity coefficients are newly designed from the machine-part incidence matrix. Machine cells are formed using a recurrent neural network in which the similarity coefficients are used as connection weights between processing units. Then parts are assigned to complete the cell composition. The proposed algorithm is applied to 30 different kinds of problems appeared in the literature. The results are compared to those by the GRAFICS algorithm in terms of the grouping efficiency and efficacy.

• 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.

• Journal of Korean Institute of Industrial Engineers
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.141-154
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• 1996

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 coefficient methods, Gupta and Seifoddini's method and the proposed method, is conducted.

• Journal of Korean Society of Industrial and Systems Engineering
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• v.28 no.1
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• pp.121-128
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• 2005

This paper proposes the heuristic approach for the generalized GT(Group Technology) problem to consider the restrictions which are given the number of cell, maximum number of machines and minimum number of machines. This approach is classified into two stages. In the first stage, we use the similarity coefficient method which is proposed and calculate the similarity values about each pair of all machines and align these values in descending order. If two machines which is selected is possible to link the each other on the edge of machine cell and they don't have zero similarity value, then we assign the machines to the machine cell. In the second stage, it is the course to form part families using proposed grouping efficacy. Finally, machine-part incidence matrix is realigned to block diagonal structure. The results of using the proposed approach are compared to the Modified p-median model.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems Conference
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• 1996.10a
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• pp.315-318
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• 1996

The machine-part cell formation means the grouping of similar parts and similar machines into families in order to minimize bottleneck machines, bottleneck parts, and inter-cell part movements in cellular manufacturing systems and flexible manufacturing systems. The cell formation problem is knows as a kind of NP complete problems. This paper briefly introduces the cell-formation problem and proposes a cell formation method based on the Kohonen's self-organizing feature map which is a neural network model. It also shows some experiment results using the proposed method. The proposed method can be easily applied to the cell formation problem compared to other meta-heuristic based methods. In addition, it can be used to solve large-scale cell formation problems.

• Proceedings of the Korean Operations and Management Science Society Conference
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• 2003.11a
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• pp.259-262
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• 2003

Group technology(GT) is a manufacturing philosophy which identifies and exploits the similarity of parts and processes in design and manufacturing. A specific application of GT is cellular manufacturing. the first step in the preliminary stage of cellular manufacturing system design is cell formation, generally known as a machine-part cell formation(MPCF). This paper presents and tests a grouping gentic algorithm(GGA) for solving the MPCF problem and uses the measurements of e(ficacy. GGA's replacement heuristic used similarity coefficients is presented.

• 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.

• Journal of Korean Institute of Industrial Engineers
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• v.30 no.4
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• pp.285-293
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• 2004

In this study, a machine grouping problem for the formation of manufacturing cells is considered. We constructed the problem as minimizing manufacturing leadtime consisting of parts' processing, moving, and waiting time. Specifically, the main objective of the defined problem is established as minimizing inter-cell traffic in order to minimize the part's moving time. In addition, to reduce the waiting time of parts, the load balance among cells is implicitly included as constraints. Since this problem is well known as NP-complete and cannot be solved in polynomial time, a genetic algorithm is implemented to obtain solutions. Also, a local optimization algorithm is applied in order to improve the solution by the genetic algorithm. Several experiments show that the suggested algorithms guarantee near optimal solutions in a few seconds.

• Journal of Korean Institute of Industrial Engineers
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.23-34
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• 1993

Although there are numerous studies that address the problem of optimal machine grouping and part family classification for cellular manufacturing, little research has been reported that studies the conditions where cellular manufacturing is appropriate. This paper, in order to evaluate and compare the job shop with the GT cellular shop, the performance of those shops were simulated by using SIMAN. We tested the effect of independent variables including changes of product demands, intercell flow level, group setup time, processing time variability, variety of material handling systems, and job properties (ratio of processing time and material handling time). And also performance measures (dependent variables), such as machine utilization, mean flow time, average waiting time, and throughput rate, are discussed. Job shop model and GT cellular shop written in SIMAN simulation language were used in this study. These systems have sixteen machines which are aggregated as five machine stations using the macro feature of SIMAN. The results of this research help to better understand the effect of production factors on the performance of cellular manufacturing systems and to identify some of the necessary conditions required to make these systems perform better than traditional job shops. Therefore, this research represents one more step towards the characterization of shops which may benefit from cellular manufacturing.