Fuzzy Modeling and Genetic Algorithms for Data Mining and Exploration

9.2 Overview

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363

Cost to manufacture and

ship 1 car

Production line steady state volume (cars/day)

1

1200

0

10,000

Figure 9.13 A nonlinear production cost curve.

to assemble, paint, and ship 1,000,000 cars? Both of these questions

involve a nonlinear system. The cost of setup, labor, electricity, and

other factors means that producing a single car (or any small number of

cars) is far more expensive than a large number of cars in a production

system. Figure 9.13 illustrates this nonlinear relationship between cost

and production line volume.

The plateau regions in the function are generally related to the cost

of energy and materials that often have quantity-based ...