Designing group technology manufacturing systems using heuristics branching rules

Group technology (GT) has been proposed to increase productivity in manufacturing. The basic idea of GT is to exploit the similarity between parts and manufacturing processes. Parts similar in design and manufacture are grouped into part families. Machines are organized into machine cells to process part families. The problem of forming part families and machine cells is referred to as the GT problem. In this paper, we evaluate several branching rules for a branch-and-bound algorithm for solving the GT problem. Furthermore, we develop another branching rule to deal with the general GT problem in which exceptional machines are considered. The computational experience is also reported.