Efficient solution for machine cell formation in group technology

Abstract

The design of cellular manufacturing (CM) systems has received considerable attention from both practitioners and academics in the study of automated manufacturing systems. CM, an application of group technology (GT), focuses on grouping parts with similar design and/or process characteristics into part families and forming associated machines into machine cells in order to achieve higher manufacturing efficiency. In this paper, we propose a quadratic programming model for machine cell formation with congestion constraint, which in addition to assigning the machines to the cells, finds the optimal number of machine cells. An efficient algorithm based on graph partitioning is used for solving the problem. Extensive computational tests are conducted to test the performance of the proposed algorithm with respect to several performance measures under various problem parameters.