Coding and Classification Based Heuristic Technique for Workpiece Grouping Problems in Cellular Manufacturing System

Part family detection problem is an NP-complete problem in the vicinity of Cellular Manufacturing System (CMS). In the past literature several part family detection techniques have been proposed by researchers which are ordinarily grounded on Production Flow Analysis (PFA). Coding and Classification (CC) techniques are merely attempted in CMS which is believed to be the highly effective method to identify the part families. This article portrays a novel heuristic approach namely Heuristic for Part Family using Opitz Coding System (HPFOCS), to materialize the efficient part families by incorporating similarity metric which utilizes part coding attributes, adopted from Offodile (1992) and the proposed technique is verified on six generic datasets of size (5x9) to (30x9) and results are compared with Average linkage Clustering (ALC) algorithm. The computational results report that the HPFOCS method is extremely effective and has outperformed ALC techniques in all instances. (C) 2011 International Transaction Journal of Engineering, Management, & Applied Sciences & Technologies. (C) Some Rights Reserved.