SEQUENCES CLASSIFICATION BASED ON GROUP TECHNOLOGY FOR FLEXIBLE MANUFACTURING CELL DESIGN

Akbib Maha, Amrani Ghacham Abdellatif, Sedqui Abdelfettah

Abstract: Flexible cell formation is based on Group Technology. Group Technology rests on the exploitation of resemblances between products or processes, which makes the identification of products’ families and machines’ cells easier. We propose a new approach based on the language theory for product family grouping according to their manufacturing sequences. This approach uses linear sequences of the manufacturing products which are assimilated to the words of a language. We have chosen the Levenhstein distance for sequence classification. We are going to compare our method to Dice-Czekanowski and Jaccard’s methods and apply the vectorial correlation coefficient as a comparison tool between two hierarchical classifications.

Keywords: manufacturing sequences, language theory, hierarchical classification, Group Technology.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.15623/ijret.2013.0212091