Abstract:
Fastener selecting is an essential step in the furniture design and development process. This step concerns many aspects of products e.g. functionalities, cost, quality, etc. Accordingly, experts in assembly and manufacturing are necessitate to be presented in this step. This study proposes an expert system to select fastener for bed furniture products in a case study company. Furniture has a short product life cycle. Its shape form and characteristics are always changed. As a result, those experts are having more workload. In the case study company, to select a fastener is based on the experiences and skill of the assembler which are tacit knowledge and are difficult to propagate to other staffs. However the assembler always refers to the previous or the similar product model in order to select the fasteners for a new product model. On the other hand, he will use his empirical experiences to select the most appropriate fasteners by trial and error in the case that the product entire new. This approach however is a time-consuming process. This study presents the expert system in order to solve this problem. It consists of a feature-base system to create furniture parts, user interfaces to communicate between user and system, a database that contains specifications of available fasteners, a knowledge base that contains design rules of application of fasteners, and an inference engine that derives answers form the knowledge base. The implementation of the expert system results that it can reduce the lead-time of fastener selecting more than 97% in comparison with the previous method.