Abstract

The issue of capturing the knowledge and skill of human experts in various problem domains and passing it on to future generations via the computer has been an active area of research for some time. Domain-specific expert systems are being developed to aid the human decision maker. This paper presents various applications of expert systems to the problem domain of industrial and manufacturing engineering. These systems were developed with commercial as well as research interests in the eighties. For each of the systems discussed here, our main interests are the problem definition, implementation scheme, and special features, if any. Subsequently, the focus of the paper is on the continuing efforts for design and development of expert systems for one of the most important functions in manufacturing viz. process planning. Some of the popular approaches used are briefly discussed.