Title: An intelligent web-based expert system for analysing a company's strategic PDM requirements

Authors: Rajeev Kumar, P.S. Midha

Addresses: Academic Urology Unit, Royal Hallamshire Hospital, The University of Sheffield, Sheffield S10 2JF, UK ' Centre for Innovative Manufacturing and Machine Vision Research, Faculty of Computing, Engineering and Mathematical Sciences, University of the West of England, Frenchay Campus, Bristol BS16 1QY, UK

Abstract: This paper proposes an innovative expert system based approach for analysing a company's strategic Product Data Management (PDM) requirements. The proposed Expert System (ES) incorporates a novel adaptation of Quality Function Deployment (QFD) methodology along with a Fuzzy Inference System (FIS) to generate a requirement specification for a PDM system. The fusion of the three techniques within a single framework helps provide an intelligent, robust and powerful framework for PDM requirement analysis. Unlike other combinations of artificial intelligent techniques and QFD, the proposed ES incorporates the entire QFD process within an ES environment.

Keywords: product data management; strategic PDM; product lifecycle management; PLM; quality function deployment; QFD; collaborative product development; expert systems; ES; internet; world wide web; fuzzy inference; requirements analysis; intelligent PDM; PDM implementation; PDM selection.

DOI: 10.1504/IJPLM.2006.009404

International Journal of Product Lifecycle Management, 2006 Vol.1 No.3, pp.230 - 248

Published online: 28 Mar 2006 *

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