Title: A neuro-agglomerative approach to strategic design of a manufacturing cell

Authors: Sourav Sengupta; 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 ' Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, West Bengal University of Technology, BF 142, Salt Lake City, Kolkata, 700064, India

Abstract: Intelligent design of cells in industrial manufacturing popularly known as cellular manufacturing systems (CMS) has attained the significant attention of academicians and researchers over the last three decades. It is an efficient production strategy for batch type of production. Over the years, various approaches have been used in cell formation and continue to attract researchers with new and improved approaches and experimentation. In this paper, a neuro-agglomerative algorithm is proposed to simplify strategic design of manufacturing cell in cellular manufacturing systems. The algorithm designed is cable of evaluating problems both in simple binary form and non-binary form considering processing time as a production factor. The performance of the proposed technique is tested on the benchmark problems and compared to popular cell formation approaches as found in the recent literature. The results support the better performance of the proposed algorithm.

Keywords: group technology; cellular manufacturing systems; CMS; artificial neural networks; ANNs; fuzzy ART; adaptive resonance theory; agglomerative clustering; intelligent design; cell design; manufacturing cells.

DOI: 10.1504/IJIE.2012.052555

International Journal of Intelligent Enterprise, 2012 Vol.1 No.3/4, pp.215 - 232

Published online: 02 Sep 2014 *

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