The formation of machine‐part families is an important task in the design of cellular and flexible manufacturing systems. The formation results in the creation of many benefits for manufacturing systems. Among the many methods utilized in machine‐cells formation, the similarity coefficient...

The paper develops an algorithm for eliminating bottleneck parts in a cellular manufacturing setting. Bottlenecks are eliminated by determining the machine duplication pattern that minimizes total duplication costs. A unique feature of the algorithm is that it recognizes that under some...