The Boston University Manufacturing Expert System (BUMES): an APL-based CASE application

Manufacturing engineering involves the processes and equipment required to design, analyze, fabricate, and test products. The transition from an engineer's first sketch to a finished, machined part is traditionally a long, expensive, difficult path. This path includes a variety of separate software solutions to individual subproblems. Together, these separate solutions raise many confusing issues of capability, compatibility, and design integrity. This paper presents the design and implementation of a fully integrated solution to this problem. This system enables a designer to sketch a part graphically, and immediately have it machined. Because this rapid-prototyping system was designed as an integrated solution, it allows the process rules to be available up-front in the part design stage, so that unmanufacturable design features are identified immediately, as the designer attempts to add them to the part. This rapid-prototyping capability also addresses the need to modify the part by changing its dimensions or its features. Design changes and subsequent machining are rapid because of the use of relational geometry, which remembers the geometric relationships between the part's geometric elements, so that if some are changed, all can be adjusted automatically. The prototype Boston University Manufacturing Expert System (BUMES) was designed and implemented using the Expert System Generator (ESG) CASE tool, in APL2.