Abstract
In a cellular manufacturing system, it is desirable that production processes of the parts in a part family can be completed in only one manufacturing cell. But, some parts may move to another machine belonging to different cells. These intercell moves are called "Exceptional Elements (EE)" in 0-1 machine-part matrix. Three operations (machine duplication, part elimination, and rearrangement of part families) are necessary to make an independent cell without EE. In this paper, we propose a method to form the independent cells with maximum grouping efficacy by taking the appropriate operations to eliminate EE.
