A data mining based clustering approach to group technology

Abstract

Abstmct-Cellular manufacturing is an essential application of group technology (GT) in which families of parts are produced in manufacturing cells. This paper describes the development of a cell formation approach based on association rule mining and 0-1 integer programming. It is valuable to find the important associations among machines such that the occurrence of some machines in a machine cell will cause the occurrence of other machines in the same cell. A clustering model using the discovered association data is formulated to maximize the closeness measures among machines within each cell. From the results of three medium-sized problems, the proposed approach shows its ability to find quality solutions of cell formation problems. &words Cellular manufactuling, association rule, 0-1 integer programming.