Expert system for design for producibility

One of the key factors to improving manufacturing productivity and hence, competitiveness, is to ensure that the design is informed by an acute awareness to manufacturing. Advances need to be made in coupling the domains of the product design engineer and the manufacturing engineer. One means to accomplish this task is producibility. Producibility (or design for manufacturing) is governed by the physical characteristics and features of a design and their implications on manufacturing. The success of this engineering approach depends on the careful consideration of manufacturing issues during the early phases of the design effort by anticipating and eliminating high risk or high cost production problems. This project presents the conceptual development of an expert system in design for producibility using a method where various problem-solving and decision-making techniques are applied to determine whether a design's parameters are economically feasible for the manufacturing of a product. This approach requires the construction of a decision network and knowledge bases that represent, as close as possible, the human reasoning requirements throughout the producibility process. The producibility analysis starts with a drawing of the new product or a similar description of it from which the key functional requirements can be obtained. The expert system then moves back and forth between a series of decision nodes where several manufacturing analyses are performed. With the input of product functional requirements and knowledge processing, the proposed system develops producibility recommendations.