Developing a knowledge-based system for complex geometrical product specification (GPS) data manipulation

Geometrical product specification and verification (GPS) matrix system is a universal tool for expressing geometrical requirements on product design drawings. It benefits product designers through providing detailed description of functional requirements for geometrical products, and through referring to corresponding manufacturing and verification processes. In order to overcome current implementation problems highlighted in this paper, a GPS knowledge base and a corresponding innovative inference mechanism have been researched, which led to the development of an integrated GPS knowledge-based system to facilitate rapid and flexible manufacturing requirements. This paper starts with a brief introduction of GPS, GPS application problems and the project background. It then moves on to demonstrate a unified knowledge acquisition and representation mechanism based on the category theory (CT) with five selected examples of this project. The paper concludes with a discussion on the future works for this project. 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.