# Machine-Part Cell Formation Through Visual Decipherable Clustering Of Self

## Organizing Map 1

Manojit Chattopadhyay1,Surajit Chattopadhyay2, Pranab K. Dan3 1,2 Department of Computer Application, Pailan College of Management & Technology, Kolkata-700104 3Industrial Engineering, School of Engineering & Technology, West Bengal University of Technology, Kolkata 700 064 1 chattomanojit@yahoo.com, 2surajit_2008@yahoo.co.in 3dan1pk@hotmail.com

## Abstract

Machine-part cell formation is used in cellular manufacturing in order to process a large variety, quality, lower work in process levels, reducing manufacturing lead-time and customer response time while retaining flexibility for new products. This paper presents a new and novel approach for obtaining machine cells and part families. In the cellular manufacturing the fundamental problem is the formation of part families and machine cells. The present paper deals with the Self Organising Map (SOM) method an unsupervised learning algorithm in Artificial Intelligence, and has been used as a visually decipherable clustering tool of machine-part cell formation. The objective of the paper is to cluster the binary machine-part matrix through visually decipherable cluster of SOM color-coding and labelling via the SOM map nodes in such a way that the part families are processed in that machine cells. The Umatrix, component plane, principal component projection, scatter plot and histogram of SOM have been reported in the present work for the successful visualization of the machine-part cell formation. Computational result with the proposed algorithm on a set of group technology problems available in the literature is also presented. The proposed SOM approach produced solutions with a grouping efficacy that is at least as good as any results earlier reported in the literature and improved the grouping efficacy for 70% of the problems and found immensely useful to both industry practitioners and researchers. 

Key words: machine-part cell formation, cellular manufacturing, self organising map, component plane, umatrix, pc projection, histogram, scatterplot, visually decipherable cluster

## 1. Introduction

Cell formation has been emerged as a production strategy in implementing cellular manufacturing and consists of decomposing the shop in distinct manufacturing cells, each one dedicated to the processing of a family of similar part types. Group Technology (GT) 
as defined by Burbidge (1979) is the management philosophy that believes similar activities should be done similarly. Cellular Manufacturing (CM) is the application of GT. A manufacturing cell is a cluster of dissimilar machines placed in close proximity and dedicated to the manufacture of a family of parts. In the design of a CM system, 