Formation of Manufacturing Cells: An Algorithm for Minimizing the Inter-Cell Traffic.

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a parametrized algorithm to decompose a manufacturing system into manufacturing cells. The objective is to minimize the inter-cell traffic. The algorithm is based on a proximiq index defined between any two machines and which is conversely proportional to the intensity of the traffic between these machines. We compute a density for each machine. This densiq is defined as the number of machines close to the considered machine in the sense of the previous index. We then group into cells the machines that are in the same high density domains. We finally associate a family of parts to each of the previous cells. A numerical example illustrates this approach