Fa-walca-cf: a Novel Method to Machine-part Grouping Problems

Cellular manufacturing system is the formation of optimised machine cells, which forms part families with similar processing requirements and associates machines into machine cells in order to optimise the overall production process. To effectively solve this problem a hybrid novel approach is demonstrated in this paper, which is based on weighted average linkage clustering algorithm and fuzzy-ART neural network technique. The proposed technique is tested on published datasets of past literature and the experimental results presented in this study indicate that the method is very effective for small to medium size problems. Testing large size problems and inclusion of ratio level data could be the prospective scope of future for this research work. This work is a significant addition in the on-going research in cellular manufacturing and could be helpful to the future researchers and practitioners in the aforementioned domain of study.