Developing a mathematical model for cell formation problem based on grouping efficacy

Cellular manufacturing is an application of group technology concepts. Many authors adopt either a sequential or a simultaneous procedure to group the parts and machines. This study proposes a mathematical model to identify machine cells and part families simultaneously, so that the grouping efficacy is maximized. To evaluate performance of the proposed model, two test problems chosen from the literature are solved and the solutions are compared with those of previous well-known methods using the grouping efficacy measure