A computational system for process design of injection moulding: combining blackboard-based expert system and case-based reasoning approach

摘要

The process design of injection moulding involves the selection of the injection moulding machine,mould design, production scheduling, cost estimation, and determination of injection mouldingparameters. Expert system approaches have been attempted to derive the process solution forinjection moulding in the past few years. However, this approach has been found to be incapable ofdetermining the injection moulding parameters owing to the difficulty in setting the mouldingparameters. In addition, the existing expert systems for process design lack the proper architecturefor organising a heterogeneous knowledge source. In this paper, the combination of a blackboard-based expert system and case-based reasoning approach is introduced to make up the deficiencies ofthe existing expert-system approach to the process design, from which a computational system forprocess design of injection moulding, named CSPD, was developed and described. CSPD first derivesthe process solution including the selection of injection moulding machine and mould base, toolingcost, and processing cost estimation, and production scheduling based on the blackboard-basedexpert-system approach. It is then followed by the determination of the injection mouldingparameters based on the case-based reasoning approach and the previously derived partial solution.