Expert System for Determining Welding Condition for a Pressure Vessel

Abstract

This paper describes the outline of the expert system for producing a Welding Procedure Specification for a pressure vessel which was developed with the grant from the Ministry of International Trade and Industry for Nagasaki Prefecture. What is stressed in this paper is that as welding calls for a broad range and wide variety of knowledge from many different engineering fields, it is very difficult to get familiar with each chunk of different kinds of knowledge and that it is no exaggeration to say that it is more important how to manipulate these different kinds of knowledge. Object oriented programing environment provides a really workable basis for developing a welding expert system because we can construct a meta rule system without any detailed knowledge about the content of each particular rule. Thus we may be able to construct a system which permits a very flexible reasoning that corresponds to the actual trial and error way of decision making of welding engineers.