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

Issue title: Special Supplement Issue in Section A and B: Selected Papers from the ISCA International Conference on Software Engineering and Data Engineering, 2010

Guest editors: Narayan C. Debnath

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Lin, Huan-Yu^{a; *} | Su, Jun-Ming^b | Tseng, Shian-Shyong^c | Hsu, Chi-Chun^a | Ku, Chung-Chao^d | Tsai, Jui-Pin^d

Affiliations: [a] Department of Computer Science, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan | [b] Department of Information and Learning Technology, National University of Tainan, Tainan, Taiwan | [c] Department of Applied Informatics and Multimedia, Asia University, Taichung, Taiwan | [d] Mechanical and Systems Research Laboratories, Industrial Technology Research Institute, Hsinchu, Taiwan | Department of Computer Science, Winona State University, Winona, MN, USA

Correspondence: [*] Corresponding author. E-mail: huan.cis89@nctu.edu.tw.

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.

Keywords: Case-based reasoning, product customization, manufacturing process planning, computer-assisted planning, short product life cycle

DOI: 10.3233/JCM-2011-0373

Journal: Journal of Computational Methods in Sciences and Engineering, vol. 11, no. s1, pp. S1-S13, 2011