Prospects for process selection using artificial intelligence

✍ Scribed by Dana S. Nau; Tien-Chien Chang

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1983
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 862 KB
• Volume: 4
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0166-3615
• DOI: 10.1016/0166-3615(83)90035-0

✦ Synopsis

One problem facing modern industry is the lack of a skilled labor force to produce machined parts as has been done in the past. In the near future, this problem may become acute for a number of manufacturing tasks. One such task is process planning. Since process planning requires intelligent reasoning and considerable experiential knowledge, almost all existing computer aided process planning systems require a significant amount of supervision by an experienced human being.

There is some prospect that "expert computer system" techniques from the field of Artificial Intelligence may be successfully used to automate (at least partially) several of the reasoning activities involved with process planning. This paper discusses some current prospects for automating a process planning task known as process selection. These ideas are currently being considered for use in the Automated Manufacturing Research Facility Project at the U.S. National Bureau of Standards, and steps are being taken to implement them in an expert computer system.