THE UTILIZATION OF ARTIFICIAL-INTELLIGENCE TO ACHIEVE AVAILABILITY IMPROVEMENT IN AUTOMATED MANUFACTURE

This paper is intended to outline both the potential and use of artifi cial intelligence (AI) in the context of failure diagnostics for autom ated manufacturing systems. The specific objective is to illustrate ho w improvements in the availability of production systems can be achiev ed via the use of AI based system diagnostics. Accordingly, the paper describes several on-going application studies in this area, which inv olve the use of expert knowledge based systems (EKBS) and artificial n eural nets (ANN), techniques which are shown to possess a potential fo r fast and efficient system diagnostics and, thereby, improve the main tenance of manufacturing equipment so as to achieve high availability.