Title: Threshold algorithm for the cell formation problem

Authors: T.R. Raguraman; R. Sudhakara Pandian; R. Kamalakannan

Addresses: Department of Mechanical Engineering, NPR Polytechnic College, Tamil Nadu – 624 401, India ' School of Mechanical Engineering, Vellore Institute of Technology, Vellore, Tamil Nadu, India ' Department of Mechanical Engineering, M.Kumarasamy College of Engineering, Karur, Tamil Nadu, India

Abstract: Advanced or smart manufacturing has recently been gaining increasing attention from the academia and industry in small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Smart manufacturing for Industry 4.0, which integrates resources, information, materials, and people to formulate a cyber physical system, has been the priority of many enterprises, especially those that are small and medium-sized. Threshold accepting algorithm is useful to resolve the cell formation problem which is based on the three perturbation techniques such as pair-wise exchange, insertion and random insertion perturbation schemes. This paper aims to maximise the grouping efficacy as it is one of the best performance measures for the cell formation problem. The performance evaluation of threshold accepting algorithm had actually been carried out after testing the benchmark problems of various literatures. This evaluation method proves that three perturbation schemes have the ability to sort out the cell formation problem. Among these three perturbation schemes, the random insertion perturbation scheme is providing better solutions than the others.

Keywords: small and medium enterprises; SMEs; cellular manufacturing system; smart manufacturing; threshold accepting algorithm; part machine grouping; grouping efficacy.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAIP.2020.107538

International Journal of Advanced Intelligence Paradigms, 2020 Vol.16 No.3/4, pp.368 - 380

Received: 06 Jul 2017
Accepted: 10 Oct 2017
Published online: 01 Jun 2020 *

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