Research On Knowledge Management For Die & Mold Manufacturing

Die & mould industry is a typical order-driven manufacturing industry. Because the order is unpredictable and the production process is experience-dependent, it is very hard to control the production plan. The planning of manufacturing process for a die & mould not only affects the quality and delivery time of a die & mould, but also is the base to control the production process of a die & mould. At present, since the design of manufacturing process for a die & mould depends on the experience of the designer and takes a lot of time, there still are many companies not have a special department to plan the manufacturing processes for dies & moulds, which resulted in the management of the production process more difficult. Consequently, it will have a very important role to provide a tool to help the designers of manufacturing process planning of dies & moulds.According to the features of manufacturing process for dies & moulds, the knowledge-based method for the design of manufacturing process is deeply studied, and the process cells and typical process cases are proposed to aid the designers planning the manufacturing processes of a die & mould. In order to store and manage the process cells and typical process cases as a knowledge base via DBMS, the triple and quaternion group are separately adopted to represent them. Based on the representing scheme, a hybrid searching method is proposed to pick out the required knowledge quickly. In addition, during the production process, a lot of information ( like quality data, design and manufacturing changed data, etc.),which contains rich knowledge, can be collected,for extracting out the useful knowledge from these collected information, a decision-tree-based method is applied to mine the knowledge, which is then classified and stored into the knowledge base with case-based method.Based on the research mentioned above, the functional specification of a knowledge management system for die & mould manufacturing process is described with UML, and developed upon the J2EE and MVC architecture. The system has been integrated into the eMan system, a production management system for die & mould companies, and successfully applied in many companies.