The Use of Expert Systems in Process-Planning

Summary With the rapidly diminishing number of expert process-planners in industry, there is an increasingly urgent need to automate the process-planning function, and to emulate as far as possible on a computer, the expertise of the planner. Process-planning is notoriously difficult to perform using normal algorithmic techniques, and so Expert Systems are proposed as a method of capturing human planning knowledge, and making deductions leading to sensible planning sequences. EXCAP, an Expert Computer-Aided Process-Planning System is described. Although only at a development stage at present, sufficient work has been done to demonstrate the feasibility of an Expert Systems' approach to the planning problem. The dialogue of a simple interactive EXCAP session is given, and necessary future developments proposed.