[munk-a]

I work with a rather complex database in my day job and occasionally maintain a very human-oriented ERD for employee education - I've looked at various auto-ERDs in the past and failed to find one that can actually produce a decently pleasant visual diagram as output - most of them will just give up on the task and lay tables out in a roughly hierarchical display based on distance from a relatively core table and then let links between tables lie where they may.

Optimizing layout is a very interesting problem and one interest component in Factorio in particular is that you have some real values to measure as output like:

1. Total space used

2. Total energy required (more inserters means more power - more belts usually means more space)

3. Throughput

4. Pollution produced

5. Tile-ability of the design.

6. Proportion of unused space within a bounding box

Probably a few other fun ones - it actually sounds like a pretty approachable problem to get objectively good results out of.