Machine Groups and Part Families: An Effective mTSP-Based Solution Approach

Group technology is a manufacturing philosophy in which similar parts are identified and grouped together to take advantage of their similarities in manufacturing and design. It involves the grouping of parts into part-families and machines into machine-cells so that a family of parts can be produced within a group of machines. In this paper, a multiple traveling salesmen problem (mTSP) based approach is proposed for cell formation problems in group technology. In this method similar machines are assigned to cells using our proposed mTSP-based solving approach and then similar parts are assigned to the cells to increase the cells performance and decrease the inter cell movements. The method is designed in a way that it is flexible in changing size and number of cells. A number of test problems from the literature are carried out to verify the good ability of the proposed model to form part-machine grouping in comparison of the previous models.