A method for finding minimal bottle-neck cells for grouping part-machine families†

The selection of parts and machines poses an important problem in the design and planning phases of cellular manufacturing and flexible manufacturing systems. In most real-life situations, this grouping invariably leads to 'bottleneck’ parts and machines. This paper discusses a method of identifying the minimal number of bottle-neck cells (machines or parts) which, when dealt with through either duplication of machines or subcontracting of parts, will result in perfect part-machine groupings with no overlap. The polynomially bounded algorithms used in the analysis are oriented towards finding minimal cut-nodes in either partition of the bipartite part-machine graph.