Abstract In shape rolling, the determination of roll pass and profile design is of importance. In the present investigation, a knowledge-based expert system is developed for the design of roll pass and profile sequences for the shape rolling of round and square bars. For development of the program, C++ language and an object oriented programming technique were utilized in consideration of the flexibility and expandability of the program. A backward chaining algorithm was employed for the inference engine to determine the manufacturing sequences in reverse order based on design rules extracted from the literature. For optimization of the process sequence design, the number of roll passes was minimized by comparing the error between the inferred roll passes and the initial error provided as input. In the currently developed expert system, five geometries such as box, square, diamond, oval and round were introduced as a basic geometry to describe the intermediate roll geometries. In addition, the roll separating force, area reduction and change of length at each stage of shape rolling were determined and displayed on the monitor of a personal computer. The system was applied for the shape rolling of round and square bars. The process sequences determined were proven to be reasonable compared to those available at practice.