An efficient heuristic in manufacturing cell formation for group technology applications

In this paper, the problem of obtaining a good decomposition of the manufacturing system into manufacturing cells is addressed. The parts can be partitioned into families, whereby each part family is assigned to a single cell. A simple twofold heuristic algorithm capable of minimizing inter-cell material movement, and addressing industrial applications of realistic dimensions is presented. The first step of the proposed heuristic is a bottom-up aggregation procedure to minimize what is defined as 'Normalized Inter-Cell Traffic'. The second step is a procedure to attempt further improvement, in which the significance of a machine to a cell is validated. A large scale industrial application of the system is also presented.