A new mathematical approach to supporting group technology

This paper presents a mathematical approach which can be successfully applied in different group technology problems. The method is originated from formal concept analysis (FCA). We produce some particular extent partitions of a formal context which encodes the relationship between given technical objects and their attributes. We show how to define the part type notions and also how to solve the cell formation problem by means of these extent partitions. The main focus of the paper is a solution method for the determination of master parts. The method is based on notions defined by modal operators analogously to formal concepts and uses the extent partitions of the complementary context. It follows from the nature of the problem that several solutions can exist; a consistency measure is introduced in order to rank them. [Received 1 June 2012; Revised 12 April 2013; Accepted 17 June 2013]