Effect of implementing cell formation algorithm for cellular manufacturing systems

Abstract

Cellular Manufacturing is one of the lean manufacturing approaches that helps organizations to build variety of products for their customers with due considerations on economy and lead time. Cellular manufacturing layouts are designed by means of an integrated matrix form dataand#8223;s consisting of both parts produced by organizations and machineries, commonly termed as machine component incident matrix (MCIM). MCIM is the key input for Cell design which is the most important process in implementing Cellular Manufacturing systems through the application of group technology. Cell design ensures the effective utilization of equipments and workstations in cell clusters. Clustering of the facilities is done by taking the advantage of similarity in manufacturing process of different parts. Clustering algorithms like Direct Clustering Algorithm (DCA), Rank Order Clustering algorithm (ROC) and Single Linkage clustering algorithm (SLC) are commonly applied algorithms for clustering the facilities. DCA as well as ROC are array based clustering algorithms and SLC works on grouping of machines based on manufacturing similarity. Data sets for Machine Component Incident Matrix (MCIM) are collected from the Pump Industries and the development environment used for the research work is R-Tool and MATLAB. MCIM is formed as input for analysis by varying no of workstations and parts. Various sizes of MCIM have been framed with matrix sizes in the range of 5x7, 7x8 type 1, 7x 8 type 2 and 7x11. Two matrices of same sizes (i.e.) type 1 and type 2 have been formulated to analyze the impact of interaction cells. newline