A Manufacturing Cell Formantion Algorithm Using Neural Networks

신경망을 이용한 제조셀 형성 알고리듬

In a increasingly competitive marketplace, the manufacturing companies have no choice but looking for ways to improve productivity to sustain their competitiveness and survive in the industry. Recently cellular manufacturing has been under discussion as an option to be easily implemented without burdensome capital investment. The objective of cellular manufacturing is to realize many aspects of efficiencies associated with mass production in the less repetitive job-shop production systems. The very first step for cellular manufacturing is to group the sets of parts having similar processing requirements into part families, and the equipment needed to process a particular part family into machine cells. The underlying problem to determine the part and machine assignments to each manufacturing cell is called the cell formation. The purpose of this study is to develop a clustering algorithm based on the neural network approach which overcomes the drawbacks of ART1 algorithm for cell formation problems. In this paper, a generalized learning vector quantization(GLVQ) algorithm was devised in order to transform a 0/1 part-machine assignment matrix into the matrix with diagonal blocks in such a way to increase clustering performance. Furthermore, an assignment problem model and a rearrangement procedure has been embedded to increase efficiency. The performance of the proposed algorithm has been evaluated using data sets adopted by prior studies on cell formation. The proposed algorithm dominates almost all the cell formation reported so far, based on the grouping index($\alpha$ = 0.2). Among 27 cell formation problems investigated, the result by the proposed algorithm was superior in 11, equal 15, and inferior only in 1.