Research On The Intelligent Quotation Method Of Injection Mold Based On AHP And CBR Technology

With the rapid development of modern industry and the sharp shortening of products' upgrading period, demand for moulds is ever growing. This leads to more opportunity to mold-making companies as well as fiercer competition. In order to survive and keep on developing, mold-making companies must make arduous efforts for more orders. So how to quote a mold accurately and quickly becomes an important problem when in the face of inquiry. Thus a research was made by this paper. Having consulted many literatures, this paper put forward the method of quoting by the parts and customization and adjustability of quotation software in a creative way. Using AHP and CBR technology, combined with automatic extraction of CAD parameters, a CAD intelligent quotation model was established and a prototype system was developed. The outlines of each chapter of this paper are as follows:Chapter one discussed the importance of quoting a mold quickly and exactly at first, and then focused on reviewing mold quotation methods and current situation of computer-aided mould quotation system at home and abroad. Lastly it proposed the contents and goals of the research.Chapter two presented the basic principles,phytogenies and key technologies of AHP and CBR in detail. This chapter laid the emphases on the construction of AHP hierarchical structure and key technologies of CBR such as case presentation, case storage, case retrieval, case adaptation and case-library update.Chapter three extracted several features that play an important role in the cost of injection molds, and then introduced a presentation model using the above features and mold price. Intelligent extraction of DXF files' information was studied in this paper. It adopted improved Kolodner distance as the formula to calculate similarity between price cases. Considering differences between features, this paper defined similarity functions for digital features and similarity tables for character features. With respect to the diffculty of determing case feature weights, a pertinent research was made in this paper using AHP to make weights-determing automatic and systematic. At last how to update and maintain the price case library of injection molds was also discussed.Chapter four introduced the quoting flow of the intelligent quotation model. It discussed the four main modules in detail: customization module, quoting on the whole mold module, quoting on the parts module and part calculating module.Chapter five, on the basis of theory research in former chapters, built a computer-aided quotation system for injection molds with Visual FoxPro 9.0 as the development tool, and then introduced each function module of the system in general. In the end of this chapter, an example of injection molds was used to test the system's reliability.Chapter six summarized the main contents and achievements of this paper, and put forward the direction for the future research.