A heuristic approach based on Euclidean distance matrix for the machine-part cell formation problem

Abstract Cellular manufacturing system (CMS) is an example of application of group technology in manufacturing systems. The cell formation problem (CFP) in CMS aims to identify part families and machine cells in order to minimize the intercellular movement and to maximize the machine utilization within a cell. Previous study in CFP generally motivated on maximizing grouping efficacy (GC) by minimizing exceptional elements as well as void elements. In this paper, a heuristic approach based on Euclidean Distance matrixis proposed. Computational experiments were performed with 20 benchmark problem sets taken from the literature. Computational results demonstrate that the performances of the proposed heuristic in terms of GC are either better than or competitive with the well-known existing algorithms.

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