Object-oriented software for diagnosis of manufacturing systems

A description is given of the object-oriented analysis and implementation of a knowledge-based system for diagnosis of computer integrated manufacturing cells using a hybrid reasoning approach. The functional hierarchy of the manufacturing cell forms an inheritance hierarchy in multistrata format for the deep reasoning component, which leads to a set of symptom oriented production rules for final fault isolation and identification. Search path selection and computation are performed by a set of methods associated with the inheritance hierarchies