Expert System for Single Objective Criteria for Selection of Manufacturing Method

While material selection methods are becoming mature, the selection of manufacturing processes has been neglected particularly after the preliminary design stages. The manufacturing process selected must be an economical balance of materials, manpower, product design, tooling equipment, plant space, and many other factors influencing cost and practicality. The process must be selected in such a way that the produced product will be acceptable to the consumer functionally, economically and appearance wise. The process must assure a product that meets all design requirements of quality, function and reliability. The process should be able to meet daily production requirement, which at the same time should utilize full capacity of the machine and its tooling and should reduce to a minimum idle operator and idle machine time and must provide the maximum utilization of minimum amount of material. The process should be flexible enough to accommodate reasonable changes in design. This poses a great challenge to a manager in selection of effective and economical manufacturing process. Different organizations have different objectives and based on their specific requirement they deploy suitable process conforming to their objective. Based on their needs, the weights assigned to the objectives vary. In this paper we have made an attempt to enable the end user a selection of appropriate manufacturing method based on a single objective. In the present work, we have developed an expert system in Visual Basic (VB) for selection of a manufacturing method based on a single objective. Method and class rules are automatically generated by retrieving the data from the access database. For the problem under consideration 680 method rules and 110 class rules are generated and stored in a prolog database, methodrules. pl. The expert system shell is implemented in VB which interfaces with SWI Prolog with the help of java application using JPL library. The prolog query is generated on the fly based on the objective and the classes selected by the user in expert system shell which is evaluated using SWI prolog and the solutions are redirected to the text file, methods. txt. The expert system in Visual Basic reads the contents of methods. txt as computed by SWI prolog and presents the results to an end user. The methodology and application architecture is subject to future enhancements. Our current work focuses on a single objective. It is an idealistic scenario where a single objective defines the section of manufacturing method. In real situations multi objective criteria is required for the purpose. Nevertheless this is our first attempt towards development of such tool and our future work involves modification of the expert system to take account of multiple objectives and functions.