GT for CE: Operating Group Technology for Team Formation in Concurrent Engineering

This research proposes a method for team establishment and organization in concurrent engineering (CE) context using cell formation techniques in Group technology. The team formulation relies on the resemblances in the overall structure of interdisciplinary designs teams in CE to multifunctional machine-cells in GT. This approach avails most cell-formation algorithms to be utilized for this purpose. To maintain task sequence in teams, we apply a sequence-based cell-formation algorithm to the task-team assignment in CE. The algorithm uses Fuzzy ART neural networks which is suitable for large scale CE applications. The approach was demonstrated on an illustrative manufacturing facility design problem.