A Proposed Hybrid Clustering Approach for Cell Formation of Gear Box Manufacturing

Cellular manufacturing has shown to be an effective approach for enhancing productivity in recent years. The benefits of cellular manufacturing depend on design of machine cells, part families, and operating strategy that take advantage of cell features. This paper proposes a hybrid algorithm for manufacturing cell formation in Gear Box manufacturing industry. The proposed algorithm for cell formation combines the Rank Order Clustering-2 and similarity coefficient techniques. This array-based hybrid clustering algorithm is compared to Rank Order Clustering-2 and Void-Based Approach, for real-life example to demonstrate its effectiveness. Four performance measures, viz. exceptional elements, grouping efficiency, grouping efficacy, and machine utilization index are considered to evaluate these algorithms. The proposed method is found to be the most efficient method for cell formation and thus suggested for utilization in the Gear Box manufacturing industry under consideration.