A blackboard-based approach to concurrent process design of injection moulding

The concurrent process design involves the simultaneous considerations of product design, tool design, machine-selection, production scheduling, and cost as early as possible in the design stage, the main theme being to capture and handle a large variety and volume of knowledge. Knowledge-based system is one of the promising approaches to facilitate concurrent process design. In order to manage heterogeneous knowledge bases, an effective architecture is required to implement such a process design procedure, where more than one domain expert is involved. In this paper, blackboard architecture for concurrent process design is presented, a blackboard-based system for concurrent process design of injection moulding being developed and presented.