Expert systems for fault diagnosis on CNC machines

Abstract

The development of CNC machines has brought along a rise in complexity and automation. The efficiency of such systems depends strongly on their reliabilty and availability in the production process. Thus, the cause of a break-down of a machine should be detected by the user and in most cases be repaired immediately.

We have developed a diagnosis system prototype which runs on the machine control and reasons about 200 fault possibilities. The architecture of this system is divided into the development environment on a UNIX based, graphic workstation for entering the expert's knowledge and the target environment on the machine control. The expert system tool on the development environment is written in COMMONLISP and the system on the target environment is written in C.