Formation of Cells in a Crane Shop by the Binary Data Based Cell Formation Methods

Manufacturing companies that activate on the functional layout need a specific procedure while switching to the cellular manufacturing. The first step in this procedure is formation of cells in the appropriate amount and sizes. The part-machine incidence matrix that consists of binary data and shows production flows of the parts can be used to form cells. Parts and machines are represented on rows and columns in this matrix. The machine cells and part families are determined by the transformation of this binary part-machine incidence matrix to the block-diagonal matrix. There are many methods to form a block-diagonal matrix. In this study, three of these methods have been applied to a part-machine incidence matrix that was gathered from a crane shop. As a result, it has been proposed that a new layout which consisted of two cells. The purpose of this study is to make this presented procedure as a traceable example for the similar shops