A CONFIGURATION-BASED CLUSTERING-ALGORITHM FOR FAMILY FORMATION

In Cellular Manufacturing literature, early work focused on the use of routers as a way of forming product families and manufacturing cells. Later, several measures of similarity among machines and parts have b een proposed by different authors. In this paper, a new clustering alg orithm is proposed that considers the number of machines of each type and the most recent configuration of cells in revising the values of s imilarity coefficient. The potential benefits of the procedure is demo nstrated with a simple example.