Analysis of a distributed group technology methodology

Group Technology (GT) is a methodology that utilizes the similarity among parts or machine features. As such, the relevant features of the parts have to be considered in order to get the best grouping. This information is required in advance and has to remain constant. Contemporary manufacturing, on the other hand, advocates flexibility with less commitment to the features used for clustering. This paper analyzes the affect that information missing or arriving at a different order has on the grouping of parts. In order to evaluate the variations in information availability, the paper presents a grouping methodology that allows parts to be grouped as they arrive, in a piecewise manner. This article also compares the quality of the grouping when all the information is available at the beginning, to the quality of the grouping when the information is received gradually. The grouping methodology presented in this paper is distributed and asynchronous, utilizing intelligent agents. It is implemented using C++ on a PC computer.