Developing an expert system to select a manufacturing strategy: Lean or Agile?

Having reviewed the literature and related data, we found that many researchers focused on analyzingand evaluating only a single type of manufacturing strategy, or even specific supply chain managementsuch as lean and agile. In some researches, attributes and enablers of a manufacturing strategy areexamined in and prioritized for organizations (Meade and Sarkis, ۱۹۹۹; Vinodh et al., ۲۰۱۰, Vinodhand Chintha, ۲۰۱۱; Vinodh & Vimal, ۲۰۱۲, Mançanares et al., ۲۰۱۵; Singh et al., ۲۰۱۵). This works thebest when manufacturing strategy is selected using a comprehensive mechanism and, then, attributesand enablers of the selected strategy are evaluated. However, studies show that, using multi-attributedecision making (MADM), some researchers have proposed a framework for selecting manufacturingsystem of supply chain management (Mohanty and Venkataraman,۱۹۹۳; Agarwal et al., ۲۰۰۶; Anandand Kodali, ۲۰۰۹; Razmi et al., ۲۰۱۱). It appears that the selection of manufacturing strategy can befacilitated by employing an enriched mechanism with existing knowledge derived from the literatureand university and industry experts’ experiences. This is in fact the proposed expert system of this paperfor strategy selection. In this system, the decision-maker (avoiding common biases in decision-making)inputs the required specification into the system and obtains the best strategy fitting with theorganization. In other words, using an expert system based on if-then rules, this paper provides a contextfor selecting a manufacturing strategy. Moreover, the existing knowledge of this expert system isderived from an in-depth review of literature as well as industry and university experts’ opinions in thearea of lean and agile strategy can surely be an appropriate reference for organization decision-makers.Expert system is one of artificial intelligence branches (Cawsey, ۱۹۹۷) that imitates experts’ behaviorin a specific field of knowledge (Giarratano & Riley, ۱۹۸۹). Expert system initiates with askingquestions about problem resolution. When required information is gathered (entered by the user),system proposes suggestions for solving the problem (Liao et al, ۲۰۰۴).Welbank (۱۹۸۳) defined expertsystem as “a program that contains a broad range of knowledge in a limited scope and uses complexinferential reasoning to do things that experts can do”. According to Figure ۱, each expert systemincludes three main components: knowledge base, inference engine, and User Interface (UI).