KNOWLEDGE BASED ENGINEERING - AN APPROACH VIA AUTOMATED DESIGN OF STORAGE/RETRIEVAL SYSTEMS

Expanding markets and flexible commercial structure s (e-commerce) generate various logistic demands and force manufacturers to offer diverse ma terial handling equipment. To fulfill this demands specially the design process must be straight forwa rded to minimize developing time, as most of the wh ole costs to produce a new product are settled here. Au tomated storage/retrieval systems (AS/RS) are back- bones of many distribution centers and widespread. As they have lots of common attributes and nearly equal characteristics, they are predestinated for k nowledge based techniques. The paper now describes knowledge based engineering in general and its addi tional value and focuses on a practical design of a n AS/RS. The main describing equations are derived an d the realization in ProEngineer is presented.