A HIERARCHICAL DIVISIVE CLUSTERING METHOD FOR MACHINE-COMPONENT GROUPING PROBLEMS

This paper proposes a new approach based on graph theory for the machine-component grouping problem in a cellular manufacturing system. The objective is to form components into part families such that the degree of interrelations is high among components within the same part family and low between components of different part families.

Since finding an optimal solution through total enumeration is prohibitive in terms of time and efforts even for problems with a moderate number of components, a heuristic algorithm is proposed. The algorithm is hierarchical and divisive in nature and illustrated with numerical examples.