Combining data mining and Game Theory in manufacturing strategy analysis

The work presented in this paper is result of a rapid increase of interest in game theoretical analysis and a huge growth of game related databases. It is likely that useful knowledge can be extracted from these databases. This paper argues that applying data mining algorithms together with Game Theory poses a significant potential as a new way to analyze complex engineering systems, such as strategy selection in manufacturing analysis. Recent research shows that combining data mining and Game Theory has not yet come up with reasonable solutions for the representation and structuring of the knowledge in a game. In order to examine the idea, a novel approach of fusing these two techniques has been developed in this paper and tested on real-world manufacturing datasets. The obtained results have been indicated the superiority of the proposed approach. Some fruitful directions for future research are outlined as well. © 2007 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.