The quality of decision-making systems like Computer-Aided Assembly Planning (CAAP) Systems is almost entirely based on the quality and validity of the knowledge captured and stored on the system. The know-how or the organisation's experts and specialists is tacit and to capture this knowledge in a way that non-experts can use it is what this research aims to address. Two complementary assembly planning systems have been developed under the research grant EPSRC Research Grant GR/L66236. The major system is a fully automatic assembly planning system which is complemented by an interactive planning system. The paper describes the Manual Interactive Planning Sub-System for Assembly (MIPSS-A). This system is a manual/interactive system and derives its intelligence from captured knowledge and the PDM system. A special software tool has been developed which allows the user to capture the decision-making knowledge of the expert as a flowchart. This captured analytic logic is stored in an external database. This system uses the analytic logic stored externally for analysis and planning. The output of this system and that of the fully automatic system is combined to provide the user with a comparison and possible selection of the output for the final plan.
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