Building a computer-assisted process planning system using the hierarchical case-based reasoning approach

Abstract

With recent globalization development in manufacturing industries, the traditional manufacturing strategy, Economies of Scale, is not suitable to meet the current globalization market. A significant challenge for the manufacturing sector is how to efficiently design manufacturing processes to meet the product customization. Manufacturing process design knowledge, at the product-level, process-level, and machine-level, is difficult to be managed and adopted by most existing computer-assisted process planning systems due to flat case structures and one-shot adaptation manners. Therefore, in this paper, a Hierarchical Case-Based Computer-Assisted Process Planning (HCB-CAPP) system is proposed, where manufacturing process design knowledge is represented by hierarchical case trees to manage the multi-level knowledge. Additionally, an interactive, multi-level case tree adaptation mechanism is proposed to assist designers in recursively retrieving and adapting case trees from product-level to machine-level to reuse and integrate previous design knowledge. According to the experimental result, novice designers agreed that this mechanism could realistically facilitate the manufacturing process design.