Title: Applying improved median linkage heuristic for cell formation problem considering binary data

Authors: Tamal Ghosh, Pranab K. Dan

Addresses: Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, West Bengal University of Technology, BF 142, Salt Lake City, Kolkata 700064, India. ' Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, West Bengal University of Technology, BF 142, Salt Lake City, Kolkata 700064, India

Abstract: The crucial problem in cellular manufacturing system (CMS) is to identify the machine cells and corresponding part families to form the production cells. This article portrays a novel approach based on median linkage clustering (MLC) algorithm to form the production cells. The projected technique is demonstrated in two portions. Firstly, the MLC procedure and Nei and Li|s similarity coefficient method are incorporated to obtain the machine cells. Thereafter, a modified part assignment technique is recommended to form the corresponding part-families. The proposed technique is shown to outperform the other published methodologies and produced improved solutions for the test datasets.

Keywords: cell formation; median linkage clustering; cluster analysis; heuristics; cellular manufacturing systems; CMS modelling; manufacturing cells; similarity coefficient; part assignment; part families.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMOM.2011.041524

International Journal of Modelling in Operations Management, 2011 Vol.1 No.4, pp.344 - 358

Published online: 14 Jan 2015 *

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