An Improved Fuzzy C-Means Algorithm for Cell Formation Problems with Alternative Routes

Cell formation is one of the most important problems faced in designing cellular manufacturing systems. Fuzzy c-means FCM has been successfully used to solve a variety of the cell formation problems because it allows the representation of uncertain information. Many products or parts to be manufactured in the real world have alternative routes. To ignore the routes is not a realistic approach. However, most FCM approaches used to form a cellular system in the literature have ignored or avoided using the alternative routes because of its complexity. In this paper, an improved FCM algorithm has been proposed to overcome the computational complexity of the alternative routes. The improved algorithm presents an easy and practical way to solve the cell formation problems with alternative routes. An experiment was designed to test and compare the performance of the improved algorithm. The results of the experiment have shown that most of the obtained results are close to the test problems and better than the conventional crisp methods in the literature.

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