A thesis submitted m partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of engineering, School of Engineering and Technology

Thesis (M.Eng.) - Asian Institute of Technology, 1992

Demand of different types of products in relatively smaller quantities by the consumers are increasing day by day. This trend leads to high product variety. Cellular manufacturing system appears to be a perfect instrument to handle this environment. Group f01mation is one of the first problems to be solved in the system design phase and number of methods and algorithms are available to form groups. In this study, two commonly used group formation techniques, the rank order clustering technique and the similarity co-efficient technique, have been simulated to evaluate the efficiency of the techniques in terms of some commonly known criterion such as production, machine and worker utilization etc. The simulated results have been used to compare the efficiency of the group formation techniques and to find a method that leads to the formation of the most suitable groups.