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

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.

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