FINDING PART-MACHINE FAMILIES USING GRAPH PARTITIONING TECHNIQUES

A technique for finding economical part-machine families in cellular m anufacturing environments is described. The technique is based on tryi ng to optimize, in an economic sense, machine replication and part sub -contracting strategies. An important feature of this work is that it allows management and facility designers to place limits on the sizes of the part-machine families. The most recent developments in graph ap proximations are exploited. Computational results on a number of bench mark problems from the group technology literature are presented. Thes e results indicate the promise of the proposed technique.