HEURISTIC METHOD FOR SOLVING CELL FORMATION PROBLEM IN CELLULAR MANUFACTURING SYSTEM BASED ON HAMMING DISTANCE

Abstract

Cell Formation (CF) problem considers as the most important issue in the Cellular Manufacturing (CM) system particularly the design step. CF deals with the creation of machine cells (MCs) and part families (PFs). Numerous methods, algorithms and mathematical models were proposed and used in the literature for solving the CF problem. The current paper used a heuristic method based on the hamming distance to form MCs &PFs, this proposed method calculates the hamming distance for the parts, firstly then rearranges them based on the results to shape the PFs. Afterward, the hamming distance was calculated for machines, then the machines rearranged based on the results to form the MCs. Three datasets from the literature were utilized to validate the proposed method. Five performance measures were used for comparison and evaluation, these measures are Exceptional Elements EE, Percent of Exceptional elements PE, Voids, Grouping Efficiency GE and Machine Utilization MU. The results referred to the outperforms of the hamming distance based method comparing with the best known results in the literature. Among the total 20 performance indexes: three are better than, twelve are equal to and five are almost equivalent to the best known results. On the other hand, the proposed hamming distance based method is effectual particularly in terms of the number of machine cells and PE.