The expert cost and manufacturability guide: a customizable expert system

Very few expert system applications have been distributed widely beyond the boundaries of the organizations within which they were developed. Instead, expert systems typically address problems for which local expertise dominates the methods for solutions to problems, and thus these expert systems represent idiosyncratic solutions that are applicable only within the organization that developed them. The obvious, though not easily attainable, solution to this problem is to provide to the end user of such an expert system the ability to customize its knowledge base. In this paper, we present the Expert Cost and Manufacturability Guide (ECMG) from this perspective. ECMG is an expert system designed to provide mechanical engineers with first-order manufacturing cost estimates and manufacturability feedback very early in the design process, during preliminary design. We describe the architecture of ECMG, particularly those aspects of its design that accommodate the need for customizability. This is followed by a description of the expert systems design methodology we employed to permit us to construct a customizable expert system application.