Application Similarity Coefficient Method to Cellular Manufacturing

Abstract

Group technology (GT) is a manufacturing philosophy that has attracted a lot of attention because of its positive impacts in the batch-type production. Cellular manufacturing (CM) is one of the applications of GT principles to manufacturing. In the design of a CM system, similar parts are groups into families and associated machines into groups so that one or more part families can be processed within a single machine group. The process of determining part families and machine groups is referred to as the cell formation (CF) problem. CM has been considered as an alternative to conventional batch-type manufacturing where different products are produced intermittently in small lot sizes. For batch manufacturing, the volume of any particular part may not be enough to require a dedicated production line for that part. Alternatively, the total volume for a family of similar parts may be enough to efficiently utilize a machine-cell (Miltenburg and Zhang, 1991). It has been reported (Seifoddini, 1989a) that employing CM may help overcome major problems of batch-type manufacturing including frequent setups, excessive in-process inventories, long through-put times, complex planning and control functions, and provides the basis for implementation of manufacturing techniques such as just-in-time (JIT) and flexible manufacturing systems (FMS).