Development of an Expert System for Rapid Prototyping Machine Selection

쾌속조형장비 선정을 위한 전문가시스템 개발

There are more than five dozen different RP(rapid prototyping) systems in the world and they are fairly expensive. All those systems have different capabilities and requirements in that each of them gives different tolerance, application field and part strength, etc. This situation may cause a problem of selecting an appropriate RP system. This paper presents an expert system, utilizing an algorithm that is composed up of rules to derive recommendations and answers to queries of the RP users. The expert system incorporates RP machines commercially available and adopts multi-selection criteria, namely, machine price, accuracy, build size, adopted process, etc. In the expert system, forward reasoning method is adopted and external spreadsheet for sub-data of the RP systems is used. The rules and knowledge are obtained from interviews and discussions with RP vendors and users, appropriate research publications and other reference materials.