A comparison of existing grouping efficiency measures and a new weighted grouping efficiency measure

Grouping efficiency is an evaluative measure of the machine-part groups in cellular manufacturing systems. This paper presents briefly both a critical review and a comparative study of different measures of grouping efficienc y. Special emphasis is given to the evaluation of the goodness of clusterin g solutions in the block-diagonalization of the machine-part incidence matr ix. The measures are reported both descriptively and quantitatively. In ord er to provide information on the measures, results are collected and compil ed from discretely reported sources. An attempt is made to categorize and g eneralize these measures in order to use them for goodness of clustering so lution. In order to overcome a number of drawbacks in the previously known measures, a new weighted measure is presented and its performance is demons trated through several perspectives of evaluation of efficiency measures.