Multiple criteria approach and generation of efficient alternatives for machine-part family formation in group technology

Abstract

Multiple Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) seeks to find one or several satisfactory alternatives among a set of possible alternatives. In this paper, for the first time, we develop a multiple criteria decision-making approach for solving the machine-part cell formation problem when there are conflicting objectives. The objectives are to: maximize the machine utilization rate (to have a higher productivity rate), minimize the number of duplicated machines (to have a lower cost and space requirement), and minimize the number of exceptional elements (to have a lower inter-flow traffic among cells). Our approach can be modified to consider other objectives as desired. To find the most preferred alternative to this problem, we develop an approach for generating all efficient (non-dominated) alternatives and then select the most preferred alternative from this set. Our approach consists of three steps: (i) generating a seed alternative for each given number of cells; (ii) generating all non-dominated alternatives for each given seed alternative; and (iii) evaluating all generated non-dominated alternatives to find the most preferred alternative. The relationships among alternatives and objectives are discussed. An example is solved to demonstrate the details of the proposed approach. Some experimental results solving several problems selected from the literature are also presented.