Development of an AI-based Rapid Manufacturing Advice System

The purpose of this paper is to assess the possibility of using Rapid Manufacturing (RM) as a final manufacturing route through a comparison of RM capabilities vs. conventional manufacturing routes. This is done by means of a computer-aided system intended to guide the designer in the selection of optimum production parameters according to general product requirements proper of the first design stages. The proposed system makes use of a number of artificial intelligence (AI) tools, namely: fuzzy inference, relational databases and rule-based decision making to reach an optimum solution. A pilot application developed in Matlab (R) is presented to illustrate the system application on a real mechanical part used as a case study. In the article it is shown how the proposed model may be useful for presenting feasible RM alternatives for parts and products not originally intended for additive manufacture. It also indicates when no RM alternatives are suitable for the given tasks, thus indicating those areas of knowledge which are necessary to expand in order to have at disposal comprehensive and reliable info on RM to compete with conventional processes.