Binary Particle Swarm Optimization-Based Association Rule Mining for Discovering Relationships between Machine Capabilities and Product Features

An effective data mining method to automatically extract association rules between manufacturing capabilities and product features from the available historical data is essential for an efficient and cost-effective product development and production. This paper proposes a new binary particle swarm optimization- (BPSO-) based association rule mining (BPSO-ARM) method for discovering the hidden relationships between machine capabilities and product features. In particular, BPSO-ARM does not need to predefine thresholds of minimum support and confidence, which improves its applicability in real-world industrial cases. Moreover, a novel overlapping measure indication is further proposed to eliminate those lower quality rules to further improve the applicability of BPSO-ARM. The effectiveness of BPSO-ARM is demonstrated on a benchmark case and an industrial case about the automotive part manufacturing. The performance comparison indicates that BPSO-ARM outperforms other regular methods (e.g., Apriori) for ARM. The experimental results indicate that BPSO-ARM is capable of discovering important association rules between machine capabilities and product features. This will help support planners and engineers for the new product design and manufacturing.