Formation of Machine Cells/ Part Families in Cellular Manufacturing Systems Using an ART-Modified Single Linkage Clustering Approach – A Comparative Study

This paper proposes an Art Modified Single Linkage Clustering approach (ART-MOD-SLC) to solve cell formation problems in Cellular Manufacturing. In this study, an ART1 network is integrated with Modified Single Linkage Clustering (MOD-SLC) to solve cell formation problems. The Percentage of Exceptional Elements (PE), Machine Utilization (MU), Grouping Efficiency (GE) and Grouping Efficacy (GC) are considered as performance measures. This proposed heuristic ART1 Modified Single Linkage Clustering (ART-MOD-SLC) first constructs a cell formation using an ART1 and then refines the solution using Modified Single Linkage Clustering (MOD-SLC) heuristic. ART1 Modified Single Linkage Clustering has been applied to most popular examples in the literature including a real time manufacturing data. The computational results showed that the proposed heuristic generates the best solutions in most of the examples. The proposed method is compared with the well-known clustering approaches selected from the literature namely ROC2, DCA, SLC and MOD-SLC. Comparison and evaluations are performed using four performance measures. Finally analysis of results is carried out to test and validate the proposed ART-MOD-SLC approach. The MCF methods considered in this comparative and evaluative study belong to the cluster formation approaches and have been coded by using C++ with an Intel P-IV compatible system.