M. McMahon, K. Jang; Advisor: J. Baras, G. Zhang, R. Karne, G. Atallah
Objective
To develop an expert system to optimize design configurations and manufacturing processes used in the production of high power surveillance T/R modules.
Description
The Expert Transmitter/Receiver Module Analyst (ExTRA) is an expert system based tool developed to assist module designers of High Power Surveillance T/R modules at Westinghouse. The scope of this intelligent tool is limited to Westinghouse T/R modules, however, the concepts used in building this application can be used for any general purpose manufacturing system. This tool provides the module designers effective ways of fabricating and assembling T/R modules and also study and analyze "what-if" situations in the manufacturing process. This system brings the experience of manufacturing engineers, quality engineers, and cost controllers into the hands of a module designer. This early integration and implementation of such knowledge and experience creates a concurrent engineering development environment which improves product quality and thus reduces its production cost.
Development Specs
The ExTRA has been implemented in C++ on a Sun workstation. It uses Postgres, a object-oriented database developed at the University of California Berkeley. The Postgres provides a sophisticated object and rule management capabilities suitable for an implementation. The graphical user-interface is based on Transportable Application Environment Plus (TAE+, a product of NASA). This interface builder utilizes MIT's X Windows System and OSF/Motif. Additional panels are used to provide a suite of reporting capabilities.
System Capabilities
The ExTRA is used to generates new plans based on the design description and a set of manufacturing constraints; retrieve/modify existing process plans from the knowledge base; and analyzes resulting plans with respect to cost, quality and manufacturability. It can suggest cost-effective means of producing T/R modules by allowing a design to be rapidly subjected to "what-if" type of analysis techniques. Furthermore, ExTRA can result in trade-off studies of costs versus quality, or versus any suitable system performance measures. The cost model uses estimation techniques to closely match with the real data and ensures both accuracy and consistency with the Westinghouse data. The quality module is designed to investigate in the context of T/R modules both quality engineering for product design and for process design. The basic user interface of ExTRA system is mouse-driven and keyboard input oriented based on X-Window system environment.
Future Work
During next phase, we expect to continue work on cost and quality module related to process planning. Also in this phase, manufacturability rating and real-time feedback on the module design will be the main task.