Enabling Knowledge Discovery from Simulation-Based Multi-Objective Optimization in Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems

Due to the nature of today's manufacturing industry, where enterprises are subjected to frequent changes and volatile markets, reconfigurable manufacturing systems (RMS) are crucial when addressing ramp-up and ramp-down scenarios derived from, among other challenges, increasingly shortened product lifecycles. Applying simulation-based optimization techniques to their designs under different production volume scenarios has become valuable when RMS becomes more complex. Apart from proposing the optimal solutions subject to various production volume changes, decision-makers can extract propositional knowledge to better understand the RMS design and support their decision-making through a knowledge discovery method by combining simulation-based optimization and data mining techniques. In particular, this study applies a novel flexible pattern mining algorithm to conduct post-optimality analysis on multi-dimensional, multi-objective optimization datasets from an industrial-inspired application to discover the rules regarding how the tasks are assigned to the workstations constitute reasonable solutions for scalable RMS.