A Knowledge-Based System for Collecting and Integrating Production Information

Design and production departments are scarcely integrated in manufacturing companies. This fact, especially for companies with a highly customized production, is very critical, since the collaboration between the two departments is essential to reduce the trial-and-errors cycles to design new products and process. It is therefore necessary to collect data from the shop floor, especially the ones related to anomalies or critical situations, and make them at disposal to be used to improve the design of the next products and processes. The aim of this paper is to develop a knowledge-based system to digitalize and collect data regarding anomalies at the shop floor, and to integrate them with data coming from the design phase, in order to reduce the time for finalizing a new product. A case study has been developed for a car prototyping company to illustrate the potentiality of the proposed solution.