Complete and fractional cell formation using Kohonen self-organizing map networks in a cellular manufacturing system

Abstract

The primary objective of group technology (GT) is to enhance the productivity in batch manufacturing environment. The GT cell formation and fractional cell formation are done by using Kohonen self-organizing map (KSOM) networks. The effectiveness of the cell formation is measured with number of exceptional elements, bottleneck parts and grouping efficiency and the effectiveness of the fractional cell formation is measured by number of exceptional elements and the number of machines in the reminder cell. This method is applied to the known benchmarked problems found in the literature and it is found to be equal or best when compared to the other algorithms in terms of minimizing the number of the exceptional elements. The relative merits of using this method with respect to other known algorithms/heuristics in terms of computational speed and consistency are presented.

Keywords:

• Cell formation
• Cellular manufacturing system
• Group technology

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the management of Arulmigu Kalasalingam College of Engineering, Krishnankoil, India and the Department of Production Engineering of the National Institute of Technology, Thiruchirappalli, India for the support of this research work.