HEURISTIC METHOD FOR SOLVING CELL FORMATION PROBLEM IN CELLULAR MANUFACTURING SYSTEM BASED ON HAMMING DISTANCE

Cell Formation (CF) problem considers as the most important issue in the CellularManufacturing (CM) system particularly the design step. CF deals with the creation ofmachine cells (MCs) and part families (PFs). Numerous methods, algorithms andmathematical models were proposed and used in the literature for solving the CF problem.The current paper used a heuristic method based on the hamming distance to form MCs&PFs, this proposed method calculates the hamming distance for the parts, firstly thenrearranges them based on the results to shape the PFs. Afterward, the hamming distance wascalculated for machines, then the machines rearranged based on the results to form the MCs.Three datasets from the literature were utilized to validate the proposed method. Fiveperformance measures were used for comparison and evaluation, these measures areExceptional Elements EE, Percent of Exceptional elements PE, Voids, Grouping EfficiencyGE and Machine Utilization MU. The results referred to the outperforms of the hammingdistance based method comparing with the best known results in the literature. Among thetotal 20 performance indexes: three are better than, twelve are equal to and five are almostequivalent to the best known results. On the other hand, the proposed hamming distancebased method is effectual particularly in terms of the number of machine cells and PE.