Abstract
The new architecture of knowledge and database management systems for process planning systems is presented. Recent progress in knowledge engineering technology gradually makes it possible to realize an automatic design system. Several researches aim at realization of an expert system for process planning, which needs an efficient management of a large amount of knowledge and data, and an inference mechanism pertinent to geometric and machining processing. To solve the first problem of them, we observed the knowledge and data used in process planning, then concluded the necessity of integration between them in a unified way. We introduced an extended Entity-Relationship model for this point. This model is composed of both entity and relationship types. The point of using this model to represent both knowledge and data is that most of the knowledge is associated with relationships. We are currently implementing a process planning system based on the above model for knowledge and data representation.
