The resemblance coefficients in group technology: A survey and comparative study of relational metrics

Group formation of machines and parts in cellular manufacturing systems are, in most cases, achieved by using the information on the similarity of operational requirements of parts. To assess the quality of solutions to the cell formation problems, a comprehensive overview of several similarity and dissimilarity coefficients based on different performance measures are covered in this paper. Analysis of the experimental data available shows that there is no similarity coefficient that performs well on all performance measures for problems from either the literature or randomly generated sets. There are very few studies reported in the literature which compare and evaluate different similarity coefficients. In this paper, a number of commonly used similarity and dissimilarity coefficients are reviewed and compared characteristically among themselves to assess their compatibility in different problems. Similarity coefficients other than those mentioned herein could not be analyzed due to the lack of theoretical and experimental results.