Author(s)

José Francisco Ferreira Ribeiro

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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.

Manufacturing Cells, Group Technology, Optimization, Heuristics, Graph Theory

Ribeiro, J. (2010) Manufacturing Cells Formation Based on Graph Coloring. Journal of Service Science and Management, 3, 494-500. doi: 10.4236/jssm.2010.34056.