Grouping Product Variants based on Alternate Machines for Each Operation

A new method for calculating the commonality between product variants in terms of machine usage is proposed. Grouping products has been studied by various authors under different titles such as product family formation, cell formation, part-machine groups formation. However, having more than one alternative machine that can be selected for performing an operation has not been considered in the area of grouping product variants. In this paper, it is assumed that each product variant requires some operations and for each operation there exist some alternative machines. The focus is on grouping the products and consequently, building a dendogram based on commonality. A new method for grouping the products is proposed and a dendogram is depicted by using Average Linkage Clustering (ALC). The resulting dendogram is very helpful as it shows the levels of similarity between product variants and can be further used by product designers, process planners and production planners.