AN EXTENSION TO THE P-MEDIAN GROUP TECHNOLOGY ALGORITHM

As suggested by Mulvey and Crowder (1979) and tested by Klastorin (1985), the p-median algorithm is useful for clustering applications. This approach was adopted by Kusiak (1985) and applied to group technology. This paper presents a modification to the p-median clustering algorithm. The new algorithm introduces p, the number of groups, into the objective function; thus, eliminating the iterative nature of the algorithm, and overcoming the difficulty of conjecturing an initial p value.