ARTIFICIAL NEURAL NETWORKS IN MANUFACTURING - CONCEPTS, APPLICATIONS,AND PERSPECTIVES

New approaches and techniques are continuously and rapidly introduced and adopted in today's manufacturing environment Recently, here is an explosion of interest in applying artificial neural networks to manufa cturing. Artificial neural networks have several advantages that are d esired in manufacturing practice, including learning and adapting abil ity, parallel distributed computation, robustness, etc. There is an ex pectation that neural network techniques can lead to the realization o f truly intelligent manufacturing systems. This paper introduces the b asic concepts of neural networks and reviews the current application o f neural networks in manufacturing. The problems with neural networks are also identified and some possible solutions are suggested. We hope that the material presented in this paper can provide useful guidelin es and references for the research and implementation of artificial ne ural networks in the field of manufacturing.