A Hybrid Expert System for Estimation of the Manufacturability of a Notional Design

The more “manufacturable” a product is, the “easier” it is to manufacture. For two different product designs targeting the same role, one may be more manufacturable than the other. Evaluating manufacturability requires experts in the processes of manufacturing, “manufacturing process engineers” (MPEs). Human experts are expensive to train and employ, while a well-designed expert system (ES) could be quicker, more reliable, and provide higher performance and superior accuracy. In this work, a group of MPEs (“Team A”) externalized a portion of their expertise into a rule-based expert system in cooperation with a group of ES knowledge engineers and developers. We produced a large ES with 113 total rules and 94 variables. The ES comprises a crisp ES which constructs a Fuzzy ES, thus producing a two-stage ES. Team A then used the ES and a derivation of it (the “MAKE A”) to conduct assessments of the manufacturability of several “notional” designs, providing a sanity check of the rule-base. A provisional assessment used a first draft of the rule-base, and MAKE A, and was of notional wing designs. The primary assessment, using an updated rule-base and MAKE A, was of notional rotor blade designs. We describe the process by which this ES was made and the assessments that were conducted and conclude with insights gained from constructing the ES. These insights can be summarized as follows: build a bridge between expert and user, move from general features to specific features, do not make the user do a lot of work, and only ask the user for objective observations. We add the product of our work to the growing library of tools and methodologies at the disposal of the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC). The primary findings of the present work are (1) an ES that satisfied the experts, according to their expressed performance expectations, and (2) the insights gained on how such a system might best be constructed.