Case Based Reasoning and Production Process Design: The Case of P-Truck Curing

This paper describes P–Truck Curing, a Case Based Reasoning system supporting the design of the curing phase for truck tyre production. The design of this process provides a trade–off between an optimal curing degree, to avoid imperfections in the final product, and the reduction of costs, related to thermal energy employed in the curing. Expert curing process designers store information about past episodes and exploit it to define new ones, without starting from scratch. A CBR system is thus a suitable approach to model this problem solving method: case structure, similarity and adaptation functions and a general system overview will be described. This work has been developed in the context of the P–Truck project, whose goal is the development of an integrated Knowledge Management (KM) system to support the Business Unit Truck of Pirelli Tyres in the design and manufacture of truck tyres.