ANALYSIS OF A DISTRIBUTED GROUP TECHNOLOGY METHODOLOGY

Group Technology (GT) is a methodology that utilizes the similarity am ong parts or machine features. As such, the relevant features of the p arts have to be considered in order to get the best grouping. This inf ormation is required in advance and has to remain constant. Contempora ry manufacturing, on the other hand, advocates flexibility with less c ommitment to the features used for clustering. This paper analyzes the affect that information missing or arriving at a different order has on the grouping of parts. In order to evaluate the variations in infor mation availability, the paper presents a grouping methodology that al lows parts to be grouped as they arrive, in a piecewise manner. This a rticle also compares the quality of the grouping when all the informat ion is available at the beginning, to the quality of the grouping when the information is received gradually. The grouping methodology prese nted in this paper is distributed and asynchronous, utilizing intellig ent agents. It is implemented using C++ on a PC computer. (C) 1998 Els evier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.