Date of Award

1992

Degree Name

M.S. in Mechanical Engineering

Abstract

The time required to produce tooling needs to be reduced in the product development cycle to bring products to market more quickly. To reduce time, an expert system was developed. The system helps designers marry part designs with manufacturing processes throughout the product development cycle. The expert system can contain a knowledge base of manufacturing technologies in use today. Two manufacturing technologies have been represented in the system. The expert system is feature-based and processes geometry, design, manufacturing, and business issues concerned with part design. These five parts make up the input collector. The expert system consults the knowledge base of manufacturing technologies using the issues identified in the input collector. The results of using the expert system are a paragraph and a list of the manufacturing technologies with their rated abilities. For those technologies which have an acceptable rating, the paragraph displays information about manufacturing. The manufacturing information generated is the time and cost to iiiproduce the tooling, the cycle time and cost to produce each part from the tooling, and the number of tools needed. The expert system was verified by entering design information into the input collector for which tooling has been produced. The results obtained with the expert system were compared with the results known by the manufacturer of the tooling to obtain the per cent error of the system. The main objective was concept verification. Therefore, the resulting total percent error within fifteen percent was considered acceptable.

Keywords

Machine-tools Design and construction, Expert systems (Computer science)

Rights Statement

Copyright © 1992, author

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