Expert system to control and to design closed loop conveyor systems

摘要

A conveyor system is an important part of a manufacturing system. As such, the conveyor system must comply with all the requirements of a modern manufacturing system: high flexibility, high efficiency, and high speed—smart reasoning processes to generate future positions based on a given current status. Because a huge number of figures and numerical manipulatuions are associated with the conveyor systems operations, the traditional numerical control techniques cannot satisfy the requirements to initiate and to control operations. New techniques based on very efficient reasoning processes are required. This article discusses an expert system that consists of a knowledge base and an inference engine that was developed to control a converyor system real-time operation. The computer runs that were performed during this research lead to the conclusion that the developed expert system can be employed to control the conveyor system real time operations very effectively. The developed expert system is considered as a reliable simulator of a conveyor system which can be implemented to explore parameters interrelationships at the phase of system design. Computer runs were performed to analyze the interrelationships between operational parameters which characterize the explored conveyor system. The expert system was programmed in a way that provides a generic simulator, which can be employed in a large variety of conveyor systems.