A new method for the design of knowledge-based engineering systems for manufacturing

Knowledge-based engineering systems for manufacturing are used to digitalise the process know-how and reuse this knowledge within the design and production phases. Their adoption allows the establishment of beneficial interactions between human experts and intelligent systems. An initial implementation of these systems can be confusing and infeasible, especially for small and medium enterprises which have not had sufficient previous experiences in applying these approaches. The main reason for this is the wide range of different scenarios that occur in real industrial cases. Existing methods that were proposed for the design of knowledge-based engineering systems fail to fulfil the needs of process engineering because they do not include certain fundamental aspects of the product design and manufacturing. This article presents a new systematic approach to design and develop knowledge-based engineering systems for manufacturing surpassing these limitations. This approach includes graphic representations that depict and organise all the relevant elements of the system. First of all, the method is described detailing the operations which have to be performed to design a new system. Finally, a real case to highlight the association between the preliminary design phase and the features of the implemented knowledge-based engineering systems for manufacturing is presented. The method is demonstrated to be a flexible approach to the systematic implementation of intelligent systems for manufacturing. Being user-friendly, its use will increase the number of potential users in small and medium enterprises.