Application of case based reasoning in injection moulding

In the determination of injection moulding parameters for producing a plastic part, heuristic knowledge and the experience of moulding personnel are heavily involved. Some researchers attempt to embody the heuristic knowledge and experience in expert systems. Simulation is another popular approach used in the determination of injection moulding parameters. In this paper, a new approach, case based reasoning, is introduced to obtain proper moulding parameters based on old solutions. Case based reasoning views reasoning as a process of remembering one or a small set of concrete instances or cases and basing decisions on comparisons between the new situation and the old one. A case based reasoning system, CBRS, which has been developed for determining proper moulding parameters, is described in this paper. This approach will not only allow the experience of setting moulding parameters to be represented easily, but will eliminate also the knowledge elicitation bottleneck which is inherent in expert systems. Additionally, a self-learning capability can be incorporated easily with in the case based reasoning system.