Applying improved median linkage heuristic for cell formation problem considering binary data

Abstract

Abstract: The crucial problem in cellular manufacturing system (CMS) is to identify the machine cells and corresponding part families to form the production cells. This article portrays a novel approach based on median linkage clustering (MLC) algorithm to form the production cells. The projected technique is demonstrated in two portions. Firstly, the MLC procedure and Nei and Li|s similarity coefficient method are incorporated to obtain the machine cells. Thereafter, a modified part assignment technique is recommended to form the corresponding part-families. The proposed technique is shown to outperform the other published methodologies and produced improved solutions for the test datasets.