2007 Volume 25 Issue 2 Pages 309-315
So-called "baby-boom generation", who was born just after the World War II, will retire soon, starting at March 2007 in many manufacturing industries, and the young successors who have less experience will not follow them to the fullest extent. Since the transmission of the work skill is greatly doubted, this is the hot topic at present in Japan as so-called "2007 problem" as an issue to be solved urgently. There will be two approaches for the solution: One is to introduce the education and training system by effective and systematic supporting tools using IT fully subject to approving the present skill as it is. The other is to study the ambiguity (tacit knowledge) of present skill systematically, and replace it to the explicit knowledge by finding the rule and principle, and then create the new system. The latter is called technologization of the skill. This paper took up the digital manufacturing as the latter example, and one application was introduced for the pipe unit fabrication. Next, it was explained that the skilled workers judged the work procedure heuristically like a combinatorial optimization. The simulation example using "reinforcement learning method", one of the heuristic combinatorial optimization technique, was introduced for the welding sequence of the ship hull block.
