Extracting Information from a CAD/CAM System
I am now going to review a past design of mine that got me on the road to the insights contained in this book.
I was supporting a design center in which engineers used a CAD/CAM system to make drawings of sheet metal parts. An example of one of these parts is shown in Figure 3-1.
Figure 3-1. Example of a piece of sheet metal.
My problem was to write a computer tool to extract information from the CAD/CAM system so that an expert system could use it in a particular way. The expert system needed this information in order to conrol the manufacturing of the part. Since the expert system was complex to modify and would have a longer life than the current version of the CAD/CAM system, I wanted to write the information-extracting tool so that it could easily be adapted to new revisions of the CAD/CAM system.
What are expert systems?An expert system is a special computer system that uses the rules of a human expert(s) to make automated decisions. Building expert systems involves two steps. First, acquire and model the set of rules that experts use to make decisions and accomplish the task. Second, implement this set of rules in the computer system; this step usually uses some sort of commercially available expert system tool. The first step is by far the more difficult assignment for the analyst. |