AUTOMATED KNOWLEDGE ACQUISITION FOR THE SURFACE-MOUNT PWB ASSEMBLY DOMAIN

The development of knowledge-based (or expert) systems for the surface -mount printed wiring board (PWB) assembly domain requires the underst anding and regulation of several complex tasks. While the knowledge ba se in an expert system serves as a storehouse of knowledge primitives, its design and development is a bottleneck in the expert system devel opment lifecycle. Therefore the development of an automated knowledge acquisition (KA) facility (or KA tool) would facilitate the implementa tion of expert systems for any domain. This paper describes an automat ed KA tool that helps to elicit and store information in domain-specif ic knowledge bases for surface-mount PWB assembly. A salient feature o f this research is the acquisition of uncertain information.