Expert Systems in Manufacturing

Abstract

Up to now, expert systems in manufacturing have been constructed so as to meet the requirements passed on from the design side. Thus, the flow of information in production has been one way from the design to the manufacturing. But as the products are getting more and more diversified with less and less amount, it becomes more and more difficult to cope with the stringent requirements from the user and the need to appropriately feed back the information of manufacturing to design and to make the flow of information two ways. There are many moves toward that goal and they are called by different names such as simultaneous engineering, concurrent design, design for manufacturability, cooperative product development [1], etc. But what is most important is that such cooperation is absolutely necessary no matter what it is called, since the feedback of past experience of manufacturing is no more straightforward as it used to be in the days of mass production under today’s situation of diversified products and re-expression of the expertises in the framework of an expert system not only contribute to the designers, but also to the manufacturing engineers because in such a situation, solutions cannot be found easily and what is very important is the manufacturing engineer should be fully aware of what he is doing and should be quite certain that the solution is within the search space he is posing.