Association rule mining for product and process variety mapping

Leveraging upon product and process families has been well recognized as an important area for manufacturers to exploit mass production efficiency, wherein the linchpin of managing variety propagation from design to production lies in the mapping relationships between product differentiation and process variation. Taking advantage of knowledge discovery from historical data, this paper applies an association rule mining technique to deal with product and process variety mapping. A case study of mass customization of vibration motors is presented to demonstrate how association rule mining mechanism helps maintain the coherence between product and process variety.