New progress on integrated environment for intelligent manufacturing automation

A methodology is proposed for advanced automation in manufacturing. Building on top of the current CAD/CAM techniques and expert system methods, integrated intelligent systems can realize decision-making automation based on a knowledge processing technique to meet the challenge of the upcoming knowledge-intensive industry. The parallel hierarchical structure of integrated intelligent software systems is developed, and an architecture of the integrated intelligent unit for controlling and managing large-scale intelligent systems is investigated. In an integrated intelligent system, the different expert systems and numerical computation routines are coordinated by a metasystem. These expert systems and numerical routines are written in different languages or programming tools, and used separately. In this way, it is possible to easily add new programs and reduce the scope of rule search to enhance efficiency