Manufacturing Plant Layout Supported with Data Mining Techniques

The question of plant layout is central in a manufacturing process. This question becomes even more important in a mass customization context, when large product diversity has to be managed. The manufacturing process, and specifically the plant layout, has to be designed taking into account this characteristic. When all products are similar, manufacturing plant layouts are relatively easy to design; difficulties come when most products are different and require specific manufacturing operations. This paper proposes a methodology based on data mining techniques to define manufacturing plant layouts in a context of diversified products. Different steps are proposed to achieve this goal. The methodology considers: 1/ identification of representative sets of products; 2/ identification of manufacturing processes and the relevant layout (for each set of products); 3/ categorization of new products (identification of the closest set of products). The focus is on data transformations that enable to extract relevant information for the manufacturing plant layout.