Expert systems in industrial engineering

Abstract

An expert system can be denned as ‘a tool which has the capability to understand problem specific knowledge and use the domain knowledge intelligently to suggest alternate paths of action’. This paper presents a structured framework for the development of an expert system. The five major aspects of expert system development are: Problem definition; knowledge acquisition, representation and coordination; inference mechanism; implementation; and learning. These aspects are illustrated through the help pf a modular robot configuration prototype expert system. Several industrial engineering applications in the areas of process planning, facilities planning, and maintenance and fault diagnosis are discussed and a comparative analysis of the different systems is presented.