Machine-part grouping for cellular manufacturing systems: a neural network approach

The machine cell formation problem is about grouping machines into machine families and parts into part families so as to minimize bottleneck machines, exceptional parts and inter-cell part movements in cellular and flexible manufacturing systems. This paper proposes a new machine cell formation method based on the adaptive Hamming net, which is a neural network model. To see the applicability of the method, this paper shows some experimental results and compares the proposed method with other cell formation methods. From the experiments, we can see that the proposed method can produce good cells for the machine cell formation problem.