Quality Assurance as a Dynamical Production Process Guide — Control Elements Supported by Dedicated Knowledge Based Systems

Abstract

Quality assurance is relevant for all steps in the lifecycle of a product, ranging from requirements definition, design, manufacturing and post-production control of each part manufactured to sales and maintenance. Quality management thus requires and enables a semantic integration of manufacturing. Not only data on lots of products to be manufactured, tools to be applied etc. have to be communicated, but rather higher level informations like tendencies in deviations (which e.g. may be used to control readjustment of corresponding tools), critical steps in manufacturing (which e.g. may recommend a less sensitive design of future products) etc. As this kind of integration obviously does not allow to predefine behaviour of respective systems procedurally, knowledge based systems are required which allow for a flexible and situation adaptive reaction of various components as well as the complete system. This paper describes current work and experiences of the authors concerning definition, development, introduction and usage of generic modules which each support single quality elements and will be connected to form a complete quality framework, which including more and more modules will integrate manufacturing through high level distributed quality control.