Example of Part Family Formation
Assume a company has been utilizing poly code for part coding & has coded its 6 part types by assigning, each digit code, a numeric value between 0 and 9. The part codes are given in the following matrix.
![1156_Example of Part Family Formation 1.png](https://www.expertsmind.com/CMSImages/1156_Example%20of%20Part%20Family%20Formation%201.png)
Figure 7
The absolute distance matrix is specified by Eq. (1); K = 8.
![1080_Example of Part Family Formation 2.png](https://www.expertsmind.com/CMSImages/1080_Example%20of%20Part%20Family%20Formation%202.png)
Which gives following
d12 = 1 + 2 + 0 +1 + 2 + 0 +1 + 3 = 10
Likewise all other diagrams might be computed and is given by the matrix below
![1883_Example of Part Family Formation 3.png](https://www.expertsmind.com/CMSImages/1883_Example%20of%20Part%20Family%20Formation%203.png)
Figure 8
The distance matrix [dij], above, can next be utilised for part family formation. One of the techniques used for this purpose is called the Cluster Analysis. In addition to cluster analysis there are a large number of other techniques which can be used for part family formation.
Cluster Analysis [7]
The objective of cluster analysis is to assign P parts of "f" part families while minimising the absolute distance measure. One of the methods used for this purpose is hierarchical clustering algorithm.