Development of an Expert System for the Trim Die Design in Automotive Industry

This paper presents the development of an expert system for the trim die design in the automotive industry. Designing the trim die blocks is a complicated and time-consuming process heavily relying on the experience of the designer. To reduce the design time and human errors, a knowledge base is developed to automate the design process. The developed system consists of a rule-base, a design process control module and a geometric modeler (CATIA). The rule-base includes design rules and know-how of design specialists and CATIA is used to provide CAD environment. The rule-base and the design control modules are developed with C++ language as an interface to CATIA. Using the rule-base, the designer can generate design alternatives easily by changing the design parameters. Also, the part-list is created automatically so that miscommunication between the design department and production department can be avoided