A manufacturing model to enable knowledge maintenance in decision support systems

Modeling manufacturing knowledge is a requirement to design a decision support system. The research reported in this paper defined a Manufacturing Facility Information and Knowledge Model (MFIKM); this model allows the storage, access, and management of both information and knowledge related to the manufacturing facility. Major emphasis was placed on process knowledge and resource knowledge to support process planning decisions. This work also explains the relevance of using different types of knowledge categorization. This paper argues that by using the novel Knowledge Maintenance Life Cycle as a method to maintain knowledge, it is possible to capture new and valuable machining knowledge using different types of representations. An experimental software application is presented to demonstrate the research ideas.