A Genetic Programming-based Hierarchical Clustering Procedure for the solution of the Cell-Formation Problem

Abstract

Cellular manufacturing is the implementation of group technology in the manufacturing process. A key issue during the design of a cellular manufacturing system is the configuration of machine cells and part families within the plant. In this paper we present a hierarchical clustering procedure for the solution of the cell-formation problem which is based on the use of Genetic Programming for the evolution of similarity coefficients between pairs of machines in the plant. The performance of the methodology is illustrated an a number of test problems taken from the literature.