A fuzzy approach for part family formation

Group technology (GT) is a planning philosophy which takes the advantages of part similarity to reduce the manufacturing costs. Since GT can significantly reduce the manufacturing cost, it has started getting attention in the areas of research and industrial applications. In order to provide an efficient tool to perform part family formation, it is the object of this paper to develop a multi-criteria system to solve the part family formation problem by implementing fuzzy logic. Based on the concept of fuzzy logic, a methodology to measure the similarity between two parts is proposed. The attributes considered in the development of similarity of two parts are production routing and geometric features. For a selected evaluation criterion, the value of related attributes are then converted to the measurements of similarity between two parts through the membership function of fuzzy theory. A composite similarity is then formulated by integrating the similarity measurement under different criterion. By inspecting the overall similarity of each pair of parts from the composite similarity matrix, a fuzzy logic based part family formation algorithm is also proposed in this paper.