COMPONENT GROUPING FOR CELL-FORMATION USING RESOURCE ELEMENTS

The work reported in this paper recognises that the traditional close association between components and a fixed route utilising a set of ma chine tools can no longer be relied upon as an appropriate basis for d eciding component similarity and partitioning components into families in modern manufacturing applications. A new methodology for describin g the capabilities of machine tools and machining facilities using gen eric capability units termed 'resource elements' is reported. REs are used to capture the processing requirements of components, assessing t heir similarity and a fuzzy grouping procedure is used for simultaneou sly grouping components and machine tools for cellular manufacturing a pplications. The reported results show that the use of resource elemen ts leads to component groups that are more compact with better matchin g between processing requirements of components and the capabilities o f the machine tools selected for their processing compared with the co nventional machine-based approach.