Intelligent advisory system for designing plastics products

Abstract

Plastics product design is very experience dependent process. In spite of various computer tools available on the market, the designer has to rely on personal or supporting experts' knowledge and experience when designing plastics products. Proposed development of the intelligent advisory system presented in this paper involves two methodologies. "Design for X" strategy will be applied to consider specific design aspects for plastic products, while "Knowledge-Based Engineering" will be used for knowledge acquisition, its systematization and utilization within the system. The major benefit of the intelligent support provided by the advisory system will be faster and more reliable product development process, as the system will offer the user some recommendation and advice about material selection and related production process. Thus, the expert team could be contracted. Minimized development process costs along with optimal technical design solutions for plastic products will enable small and medium size enterprises to compete with their plastics products on the global market. © 2008 International Federation for Information Processing.