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.

                              Figure 7

The absolute distance matrix is specified by Eq. (1); K = 8.

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

                       Figure 8

The distance matrix [d_ij], 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.