Expert system for product manufacturability and cost evaluation

Product design is an important stage in the product development cycle. A large proportion of a product's cost is governed by product design. Every effort should be made to ensure a product is "rightly designed for manufacture" at the design stage in order to avoid unnecessary expenditure of time and money in production resulting from a need for redesign. An evaluation tool in the form of an expert system has been developed for product designers to assess manufacturability of product designs. This paper describes the mode of operation in the development of the expert system from which manufacturing information such as selection of processes and materials, and estimation of costs can be obtained. The system enables product designers to evaluate product design alternatives by comparing the analyzed results to come up with the optimum design which best satisfies the requirements. The developed system runs on the PC platform.