Development of a company-tailored part classification and coding system using fuzzy clustering techniques

This paper presents a methodology for the development of a part classification and coding system suited to each individual company. When coding a group of parts for a specific company by a general-purpose part classification & coding system like OPITZ system, it is frequently observed that only a small subset of total available code numbers are used. Such sparsity in the actual occurrences of code numbers implies that we can design a better system which uses digits of the system more parsimoniously. A 2-dimensional fuzzy ISODATA algorithm is developed to extract the important characteristics for the classification from the set of given parts. Based on the extracted characteristics and the distances between fuzzy clustering centroids, a company-unique classification and coding system can be developed. An example case study for a medium sized machine shop is presented. [In Korean.]