Data Mining and Its Potential Use in Textiles: A Spinning Mil

Abstract

The purpose of this research has been to understand the possible uses of data mining in the Textile Industry, specifically a spinning mill. There is a lot of information published on the theory of data mining, however there is not a lot published on its use in a manufacturing setting. A case study approach was used to help understand how data mining could be used in the manufacturing of textiles. The focus of this research was on a spinning mill in the textiles industry and the processing that is followed with the different data elements available.

Data was collected from a spinning mill operation and then cleansed and merged to create a data warehouse that could be mined using the SAS Enterprise Miner software.

An example ideal data warehouse was created for a spinning mill. In this warehouse the different elements and formats that are needed were listed for each process in the production of a cotton fiber.

Initially a simple data mining process was used however this proved to be ineffective. Due to the successes and failures that were experienced during the research a new data mining process model was created. This model has six major steps, which contains a total of 28 specific activities that may be included in the data mining process model. The proposed model describes how data mining can be implemented in a manufacturing setting.