Creating a general Product-Operations Matrix with the help of loops

Hi all,

I am currently working on a way to create a Product-Operations Matrix which should look something like this: Columns: listing all Products Rows: all operations needed for all products

So for example M(1,3)=1 and M(4,3)=1 means Product 3 is produced using Operations 1 and 4.

The idea is to analyse this Matrix in a later stage in order to find Products that have similar operations.

Right now, I have used MS Access to export the Operations for each Product, the Table looks like this:

ProductNo. OperationID OperationTime
  1 A 0.1
  1 C 0.3
  1 D 0.4
  1 E 0.5
  2 A 0.1
  2 B 0.6
  3 E 0.5
  3 A 0.1

I would like to create according Matrix that looks like this:

0.1 0.1 0.1
0 0.6 0
0.3 0 0
0.4 0 0
0.5 0 0.5

I guess I have to use many for-loops, but I just cannot wrap my head around it... Thank you so much for your help!

Answer 1

[Kevin Gleason]

I would suggest you create a helper function as follows:

% Get the index of a letter A=1, B=2, ..., E=5
letterIdx = @(letter) letter-'A' +1;

This will correlate whatever letter is in Column 2 (OperationID) to an index in the final matrix. Next we can create a matrix of zeros in the size of your data:

prodOps = zeros(5,3);

Finally you can populate your "prodOps" matrix by using a single loop over every row of your data and fill in "prodOps" as follows:

prodOps(col1, letterIdx(col2)) = col3;