FUZZY SUPERVISION AND APPLICATION TO LEAN PRODUCTION

A novel philosophy ot' process supervision based on functional redunda ncy, i.e., analytical or knowledge based redundancy which may specific ally be used for lean production, is suggested. The key idea is to rep lace the conventional residual evaluator of the fault diagnosis system based on crisp logic, by both a decision maker with fuzzy logic for r esidual pre-evaluation and the human operator to make the final decisi ons using his natural intelligence, experience and common sense. The p urpose of the employment of fuzzy logic for residual pre-evaluation is to release only weighted alarms instead of yes-no decisions, so that (by definition) no false alarms can be produced; besides this, the man -machine interaction becomes much easier. In contrast to the conventio nal expert system approach, the proposed concept leaves the final yes- no decisions to the natural intelligence, capability and responsibilit y of the human operator which are still superior to the artificial int elligence and decision making capabilities of an expert system.