AN EXPERT SYSTEM FOR INTELLIGENT WELD SCHEDULE

Abstract

Development and maintenance of welding procedures form a major part of the work of many welding engineers. With computers making rapid inroad into planning tasks, Expert , Systems with capacity to transfer knowledge and mimic human problem solving methodology are now in vogue. Though several expert systems have been designed to specifically deal with the problem of maintaining welding procedures, selecting the optimum process, consumable or equipment for a given welding application, only few are developed to produce complete welding procedures. With a rapid growth in the consumption of Austenitic Stainless Steels and Cr-Mo steels, there is a .need to transfer the poorly distributed expert knowledge for welding of these steels. In the present work an Expert System approach for transferring this knowledge is analysed and a detailed study to extract more generic knowledge about the procedure production for welding and the application of Expert System technique to this advanced welding problem is made. An Expert System `WELSCHED' for generating WELding SCHEDules using generative processplanning philosophy has been built. WELSCHED built for Indian environment is designed to be highly interactive and provisions are made to modify the welding procedures in case they fail and to store and retrieve the WPS generated. Defect Avoidance module to give advice on avoiding defects is also incorporated. The system's performance has been validated by consulting industrial problems from various welding industries and found to be in close comparison with the solutions offered by welding experts. (