TITLE:
Manufacturing Cells Formation Based on Graph Coloring
AUTHORS:
José Francisco Ferreira Ribeiro
KEYWORDS:
Manufacturing Cells, Group Technology, Optimization, Heuristics, Graph Theory
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Service Science and Management,
Vol.3 No.4,
December
28,
2010
ABSTRACT: A method for cellular manufacturing design in Group Technology is presented in this paper. The proposed method computes the dissimilarities between parts and organizes the production system in part-families and group-machines. A graph corresponding to the production system is generated and a coloring algorithm is activated in order to obtain a number of cells equal to the desired number of cells. The corresponding program was written in Matlab language and runs on a microcomputer. The results obtained on several examples found in the literature are consistently equivalent to or even better than those hitherto proposed, in terms of inter-cell moves and dimensions of the cells.