Manufacturing cell formation problem: A graph partitioning approach

The design of a cellular manufacturing system requires that a machine population be partitioned into machine groups called manufacturing cells. A new graph partitioning heuristic is proposed to solve the manufacturing cell formation problem (MCFP). In the proposed heuristic, The MCFP is represented by a graph whose node set represents the machine cluster and edge set represents the machine-pair association weights. A graph partitioning approach is used to form the manufacturing cells. This approach offers improved design flexibility by allowing a variety of design parameters to be controlled during cell formation. The effectiveness of the heuristic is demonstrated by comparing it to two MCFP published solution methods using several problems from the literature.