A knowledge-based decision support system for the management of parts and tools in Flexible Manufacturing Systems

Flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) are very complex systems with large part, tool, and information flows. The aim of this work is to develop a knowledge-based decision support system for short-term scheduling in FMS strongly influenced by the tool management concept to provide a significant operational control tool for a wide range of machining cells, where a high level of flexibility is demanded, with benefits of more efficient cell utilization, greater tool flow control, and a dependable way of rapidly adjusting short-term production requirements. Development of a knowledge-based system to support the decision making process is justified by the inability of decision makers to diagnose efficiently many of the malfunctions that arise at machine, cell, and entire system levels during manufacturing. In this context, this paper proposed three knowledge-based models to ease the decision making process: an expert production scheduling system, a knowledge-based tool management decision support system, and a tool management fault diagnosis system. The entire system has been created in a hierarchical manner and comprises more than 400 rules. The expert system was implemented in a commercial expert system shell, Knowledge Engineering System Production System.