Manufacturing cells formation based on graph theory

A method for cellular manufacturing design in group technology is presented in this paper. The proposed method computes the dissimilarities between parts and organizes the production system in part-families and group-machines. A graph corresponding to the production system is generated and a coloring algorithm is activated in order to obtain a number of cells equal to the desired number of cells. The corresponding program was written in Matlab language and runs on a microcomputer. The results obtained on several examples found in the literature are consistently equivalent to or even better than those hitherto proposed, in terms of inter-cell moves and dimensions of the cells.