Project 01: Development of an expert system to support the editing of 3D surface models

Abstract:

During the production of medical prosthesis it is often necessary to customize the product for a patient. Today this is done by skilled operators using CAD software. The virtual models are produced by rapid prototyping techniques like 3D-Printing or stereolithography. The manual labor influence has several disadvantages. First of all the result differs from operator to operator and it is not reproducible.

To avoid these disadvantages an expert system shall be designed. First step is to acquire the expert knowledge of the operators and represent it. The knowledge can then be used by the inference machine of the EPS to make suggestion to the operators what to do next. The rules of the knowledge base are mainly based on patterns / feature points defined by written work instructions and interviews of experts.

Implementation of the expert system prototype will be done with the free expert system building tool CLIPS. To use CLIPS has several advantages. The tool is completely open source and can be used in every software system. It supports partitioning of the knowledge base in modules for easier maintenance and object orientated knowledge bases. The inference engine uses the Rete-Algorithm which is the standard for EPS shells at the moment.