Title: An expert system for gearing design application

Authors: Yiu-Wing Chan, Siang-Kok Sim

Addresses: School of Mechanical and Production Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Nanyang Avenue, 639798, Singapore. ' School of Mechanical and Production Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Nanyang Avenue, 639798, Singapore

Abstract: This article describes the development of an expert system for a gearing design application. The knowledge in this design field is vast, it involves selection of appropriate data from the large amount of engineering/standards data available in engineering catalogues and design handbooks. Experts very often have different opinions in determining design solutions. The theme of the work is to organise, systemise, conserve, and spread this knowledge of gearing design and configuration. There is a large number of design parameters involved in gearing design. The design of gears also requires an iterative approach to optimise these design parameters, which govern the kinematic as well as the strength performance. Because of the complex combinations of these factors, conventional design office practice tends to become complicated and time consuming. Hence, in this piece of work, attempts are made to formulate a design system capable of designing a required type of gear and its configuration under a specified set of working conditions. The main features of the expert gearing design system are the use of semantic nets in representing the objects, a frame-based data acquisition and representation system and production rules in representing the domain-specific knowledge base. The system provides a very friendly user interface through the use of the Prolog expert system development tool. While Prolog is used to set up the various databases and the inference engine, the detail gear design calculations are performed using C. It is found that the communication between these two languages is excellent in terms of performance and efficiency.

Keywords: expert systems; frame-based data acquisition; gearing design; mechanical design; design process; gear design; intelligent design.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCAT.1998.062179

International Journal of Computer Applications in Technology, 1998 Vol.11 No.1/2, pp.11 - 26

Published online: 01 Jun 2014 *

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