Manufacturing sequence family grouping for FMS design-a new approach

FMS design and in particular flexible cell design are founded on the group technology philosophy. The authors propose a new approach based on the language theory for product family grouping, while keeping the former approaches which are based on typological analysis and especially hierarchical classification. The method uses linear physical sequences of the manufacturing products which are assimilated to the words of a language. The weighted Levenhstein distance is proposed for sequence classification. The measure of similarities verifies accurately the criteria considered as mandatory in the industrial domain and provides an efficient sequence partition suited to manufacturing processes