A PRELIMINARY STUDY OF A FUZZY CLUSTERING AND ASSIGNMENT PROBLEM-BASED CELL FORMATION ALGORITHM

The ideal situation of CM is achieved when each part-cluster together with the machine-cluster for the manufacturing cell is independent from the rest of manufacturing cell, that is exceptional elements are non existent. However, such a situation is rarely achieved. In this paper, a cell formation algorithm that identifies part-clusters and machine-clusters separately is introduced. The algorithm is based on fuzzy clustering and the assignment technique. Computational experience shows that this new algorithm can give superior performance, especially for higher density machine-part incidence matrices. KEYWORDS