DESIGN OF CELLULAR MANUFACTURING SYSTEMS USING OBJECTIVE FUNCTIONAL CLUSTERING ALGORITHMS

Cellular manufacturing (CM) has emerged as an alternative to conventio nal batch-type manufacturing owing to the former's capability of reduc ing set-up times, in-process inventories and throughput times. It prov ides the basis for implementation of just-in-time (JIT) and flexible m anufacturing systems (FMS). The machine-part group formation is an imp ortant issue in the design of CMSs. This paper presents objective func tional clustering algorithms for cell formation problems in the design of cellular manufacturing systems. A deterministic objective function al algorithm (hard clustering) and a fuzzy objective functional algori thm (fuzzy clustering) are wed to form the part families and machine c ells simultaneously. A collection of data sets from open literature is used to test these algorithms. A software package has been del eloped to verify the implementation.