| Better utilization of raw materials and increasing efficiency are constant demands on today's manufacturing facilities, resulting in more sophisticated machinery and greater demands for human expertise in their maintenance. This maintenance can be generally classified into three categories: (1) mechanical, (2) electrical, and (3) product quality.;Since maintenance expertise is critical and its absence can be very costly to a company, there is a demand by management to capture the knowledge of their best operators, engineers and maintenance people so that it will be available at all times. Expert systems may be the tool to fill that need.;The Lathe Expert System (LES) was built to diagnose problems with a softwood plywood rotary veneer lathe. Its knowledge base is modularized into the three maintenance categories: mechanical, electrical and product quality. This not only helps to organize the knowledge base and to facilitate verification, it also provides a natural format for an effective type of search-tree pruning.;LES makes extensive use of graphics and photographs to illustrate terminology, machinery and concepts. Several methods of accessing graphics are employed in the expert system and were evaluated as to their relative merits.;A method was developed to record all of LES's consultations with the users. Usage was almost nonexistent at those locations where LES was simply added to an existing microcomputer in a manager's or engineer's office. When LES was placed on the lathe deck, a location convenient to the operators and lathe maintenance personnel, it was used 199 times over a six-week period by operators and maintenance personnel. During this time there were no known equipment break-downs or product quality problems, so it can be concluded that all of this usage was educational. This was confirmed in conversations with many of the users. |
