A simple web-based expert system for a supplier assessment: A case of a JIT production environments

Abstract

The objective of this study was to develop a simple Web-Based Expert System for supplier evaluation of a specific well-known automotive company practicing JIT. The main methodology was a knowledge acquisition by interviewing experts, a knowledge presentation in terms of IF-THEN and a Web-Based Expert System development. As a result, the rule-based decision system in forms of tree diagrams was developed to assess six basic aspects which are safety, quality, cost, delivery, engineering and management. Then a simple Web-Based Expert System was created by using two main computer programs. There are Adobe Dreamweaver for creating PHP web pages which allow to interactive information interchange between a user and a server and also between web pages and a database, and phpMyAdmin for generating a MySQL database and Apache for testing the developed Expert System. The proposed simple Web-Based Expert System was validated by applying it in a real case. The result showed that evaluating by the proposed Expert System and by an expert gave the same results. The proposed tool has potential to use as a decision tool for evaluating suppliers; however, it still needs a future validation with more cases. In addition, expert decision is regularly hard to measure with precise numerical data. So for the future study, fuzzy set theory will be integrated in a proposed Web-Based Expert System. © 2011 IEEE.