An intelligent decision support system for SMED and its application in textile industry

The new trend is to avoid high-volume batch-and-queue manufacturing to produce small batches with short lead-time due to fluctuation in customer demands. However, producing more products at small batches results in more changeovers. Thus, a rapid changeover provides to be able to manufacture small quantities of the large diversity of customer demands. One of the most common method for changeover time reduction is Single Minute Exchange of Dies (SMED) which is a technique of Lean Manufacturing. The developed prototype intelligent SMED decision support methodology uses the expertise of different experts, professionals and scientific papers. Intelligent system approach for SMED has two main functions. First one is gathering data that the system asks some questions to the user to obtain the facts of the company and the second one is intelligent recommendations. According to "the facts" and "inference engine", the system manages the SMED application and can give some suggestions. The methodology has forward chaining mechanism and 90 rules. One of the original aspects of the system is starting the methodology with the vision of the firm and strategy. If the strategy is proper for the firm, the system may continue, if not, suggest another strategy such as outsourcing or investment in production technology.