Manufacturing cell formation using similarity coefficients and pair-wise interchange: formulation and comparison

Many algorithms have been proposed to form manufacturing cells from component routeings. Most of these methods require specialized algorithms for implementation. Some others use well-known procedures such as integer programming. But these may be difficult for practising managers to comprehend. In this study we propose a simple method that can be implemented using spreadsheet software and an inexpensive layout package such as CRAFT. In addition, we also compare our procedure with many existing procedures using eight well-known problems from the literature. The results show that the proposed procedure compares well with the existing procedures using three evaluation measures. Therefore, this procedure may be useful to practitioners and researchers.