Production flow analysis

In operations management and industrial engineering, production flow analysis refers to methods which share the following characteristics: Classification of machines Technological cycles information control Generating a binary product-machines matrix (1 if a given product requires processing in a given machine, 0 otherwise) Methods differ on how they group together machines with products. These play an important role in designing manufacturing cells. Given a binary product-machines n-by-m matrix , Rank Order Clustering is an algorithm characterized by the following steps: For each row i compute the number Order rows according to descending numbers previously computed For each column p compute the number Order columns according to descending numbers previously computed If on steps 2 and 4 no reordering happened go to step 6, otherwise go to step 1 Stop Given a binary product-machines n-by-m matrix, the algorithm proceeds by the following steps: Compute the similarity coefficient for all with being the number of products that need to be processed on both machine i and machine j, u comprises the number of components which visit machine j but not k and vice versa. Group together in cell k the tuple (i*,j*) with higher similarity coefficient, with k being the algorithm iteration index Remove row i* and column j* from the original binary matrix and substitute for the row and column of the cell k, Go to step 2, iteration index k raised by one Unless this procedure is stopped the algorithm eventually will put all machines in one single group.