A wire-EDM maintenance and faulty-diagnosis expert system integrated with an artificial neural network

In wire electrical discharge machining (Wire-EDM), some faults such as wire-breaking and unsatisfactory accuracy may still occur due to improper operations or inappropriate machine maintenance. A maintenance-schedule and fault-diagnosis system that integrates an artificial neural network (ANN) and an expert system (ES) is developed. It is time-saving in knowledge acquisition, is easy to maintain and is capable of self-learning. The occasions which call for machine maintenance are devised automatically. Suggestions to eliminate faults are proposed sequentially according to the inferred priority once a fault is taking place. Moreover, it can provide explanations.