Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

Abstract

Group technology (GT) has emerged as an important scientific philosophy in improving the productivity of manufacturing systems. GT philosophy offers a systems approach to the reorganization of traditional complex job shop and flow shop  manufacturing systems into cellular or flexible manufacturing systems. The main objective of this philosophy is to achieve benefits for manufacturing systems. For implementation of this method the formation of machine-part
families is an important task in the design of cellular and flexible manufacturing systems. The formation results in the creation of many benefits for manufacturing systems. Among the many methods utilized in machine cells formation, the similarity coefficient method(SCM) is most widely used. When SCM is used. the