From Troubleshooting to Process Design: Closing the Manufacturing Loop

This paper describes the dual use of a case base for diagnosis and for improving the design of a manufacturing process. In the short term, the case base is used to provide past experience in dealing with similar problems during the manufacture of aluminum components. In the longer term, it is used to feed that experience into the design of the manufacturing process for new components. This is achieved by having a case base of previous manufacturing process problems and solutions. For diagnosis, case base matching is done in a fairly straightforward manner. In order to use the cases in design analysis, the case information about process type and problems with a particular process is fed into a process failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA), and provides details of possible problems and their likelihood. This paper appears in the Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Case-based Reasoning, Providence, Rhode Island, July 1997.