OBJECT-ORIENTED EXPERT SYSTEM ARCHITECTURES FOR MANUFACTURING QUALITY MANAGEMENT

The use of expert systems in manufacturing is steadily increasing. The majority of these systems are designed to perform process control or to diagnose process malfunction. Though quality control is generally not an explicit development goal, a number of manufacturers have realized quality improvements from the use of expert systems. The premise of this paper is that, instead of accepting quality improvements as a windfall from the development of intelligent systems, manufacturers could benefit from expert systems designed to support quality management activities. General object-based architectures for expert systems developed from the principles of two proven quality management methods-Quality Function Deployment and Quality Planning-are proposed.