Automated Capture and Execution of Manufacturability Rules Using Inductive Logic Programming

Capturing domain knowledge can be a time-consuming process that typically requires the collaboration of a Subject Matter Expert and a modeling expert to encode the knowledge. In a number of domains and applications, this situation is further exacerbated by the fact that the Subject Matter Expert may find it difficult to articulate the domain knowledge as a procedure or rules, but instead may find it easier to classify instance data. To facilitate this type of knowledge elicitation from Subject Matter Experts, we have developed a system that automatically generates formal and executable rules from provided labeled instance data. We do this by leveraging the techniques of Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) to generate Horn clause based rules to separate out positive and negative instance data. We illustrate our approach on a Design For Manufacturability (DFM) platform where the goal is to design products that are easy to manufacture by providing early manufacturability feedback. Specifically we show how our approach can be used to generate feature recognition rules from positive and negative instance data supplied by Subject Matter Experts. Our platform is interactive, provides visual feedback and is iterative. The feature identification rules generated can be inspected, manually refined and vetted.