Formation of machine groups and part families: a modified SLC method and comparative study

Abstract

This paper introduces a modified single linkage clustering heuristic (MOD‐SC). The proposed MOD‐SLC objective is to test the application of Baroni‐Urban and Buser (BUB) similarity coefficient to the manufacturing cell formation (MCF) problem instead of Jaccard’s similarity coefficient. The MOD‐SLC has been compared and evaluated against three cluster formation‐based heuristics for MCF. The three heuristics are: the single linkage clustering, enhanced rank order clustering, and direct clustering algorithm. The MCF methods considered in this comparative and evaluative study belong to the cluster formation approach of solving the MCF problem. The comparison and evaluation are performed using four published performance measures. A total of 25 published and ten hypothetical and randomly generated problem data sets are used in the proposed evaluative study. Results analysis is carried out to test and validate the proposed BUB based MOD‐SLC. Finally the pros and cons of each method are stated and discussed.