THE FRAMEWORK FOR AN EXPERT-SYSTEM TO GENERATE ALTERNATIVE PRODUCTS IN CONCURRENT ENGINEERING DESIGN

This paper presents the framework and development of an expert system to generating alternative products based on the information of custome rs' needs and existing products derived from the product realization m odel [S. Myint, M.T. Tabucanon, A multi-attribute approach to product realization, Proc. of Pacific Conference on Manufacturing, 1994, pp. 5 53-560]. Depending on the specific design, the primitive parts and att ributes are derived and stored in a database. The generation of altern ative products is based on the combination of primitive parts stored i n the database, rules developed from the expert system and the weights of the customers' needs. When deriving alternatives, there can be man y possible alternatives and thus, the final selection to narrow down a ll possible alternatives is done by functional grammar approach. The g earbox design is represented as illustrated example. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.