Comprehensive grouping efficacy: A new measure for evaluating block-diagonal forms in group technology

Abstract

The goodness of machine-part groups in cellular manufacturing systems is evaluated by different measures available in the literature. The commonly known grouping efficiency measures will be discussed in this paper. None of these measures has the ability to evaluate the efficiency of block -diagonal system and sub-system at the same time. Moreover, sparsity of individual cells was not taken into consideration in these measures. In this paper, a new grouping measure called Comprehensive Grouping Efficacy (CGE) is proposed to overcome the drawbacks of these measures. CGE is tested against some problems from the literature and the results demonstrate the ability of this measure to be used as comprehensive grouping measure since four of the well-known measures are included in the CGE formula. The superiority of CGE is that it can be used to find the efficiency of block-diagonal form, the efficiency of sub-system, sparsity index and efficacy index at the same time, which will give the designer the opportunity to control the cell size. Without knowing the efficiency of sub-systems (individual cells), the system designer will not be able to control the cell size.

Keywords

• Cell Size
• Grouping measures
• Sparsity
• Sparsity index
• Comprehensive
• Grouping measure
• Efficiency index