Data-mining approach to support layout configuration decision-making in Evolvable Production Systems

Computational and communication capabilities are increasingly being used in all devices. In the production context this leads to the generation of massive amounts of data that are rarely proficuously used. More particularly the application of data-mining techniques to infer knowledge from systems' operation to improve its design decisions remains fairly unexplored. This article presents an approach to extract system design and configuration rules from Evolvable Production Systems. Furthermore it provides the empirical results from two test-cases that support the hypothesis that a simulation-data-mining approach can help reducing the complexity of the work carried by system designers and production managers.