Group technology and cellular manufacturing

A number of survey papers on group technology and cellular manufacturing system design have been published. Many of them focus primarily on clustering techniques that manipulate rows and columns of the part-machine processing indicator matrix to form a block diagonal structure. Since the last survey paper was published, there have been some developments in cellular manufacturing system design. A number of papers that consider practical design constraints while designing cellular manufacturing systems have been published. The purpose of this paper is to provide a thorough survey of papers on group technology and cellular manufacturing system design. Its purpose is also to state some important design factors that cannot be ignored