Applications: The Polyurethane Technical Support Advisors^TM

Knowledge-based technical support in the manufacture of polyurethane products.

The Challenge

Polyurethanes are used in the manufacture of thousands of products. To get an idea of how pervasive these products are in our daily life, consider that solid polyurethanes are used to make paints and adhesives; microcelluar foams are used to make car bumpers and other parts, synthetic leathers, and shoe soles; high density foams are used to make carpet backings, rigid insulation (as in your walls and refridgerator), chairs and other molded furniture; and low density foams are used to make packaging materials and the cushions we all sit on.

Although some of these products look simple, their manufacture is quite complicated and has benefited from years of development. For example, car seats used to wear out on the sides after years of driving around corners, accelerating and stopping. But in modern seats, the strength and resistance around the sides and front differs from the middle (where most of us require a softer parking spot) to accommodate years of different wearing motions. This is attained through a specifically timed manufacturing process in which the basic chemicals (isocyanates and polyols) are injected into a heated mould with the addition of selected catalysts to guide the chemical reaction that determines the final properties of the seat cushion.

This process can fail at many points before the chemicals are even injected into the mould. The variety of products and manufacturing processes involved make it very difficult to diagnose the cause of faulty products and there is a tendency for product manufacturers to blame the raw materials rather than their own equipment or processes. The provider of the raw materials does not want to replace good chemicals that have been mishandled or processed incorrectly but does want to maintain good relations with its customer, the manufacturer. Thus, they provide value-added services to help their customer resolve and subsequently prevent problems by maintaining a "fleet" of highly-trained support technicians (usually with a background in chemical engineering).

It is difficult for people to be sufficiently knowledgeable to diagnose and solve problems in the manufacture of thousands of different products, especially ones involving chemical reactions in which almost every action affects many others. The situation is excerbated when these problems must be solved far from home without the support of colleagues. To address these issues, ICI Polyurethanes engaged Acquired Intelligence to encapsulate the knowledge of its best technical support personnel in a series of working prototype Advisors for office and field personnel.

The Solution

F-Tech: Advisor for Low Density Foam Manufacture

The first working prototype was developed to help technical service support personnel trouble-shoot problems encountered during the manufacture of flexible foam products. FlexTech suggested prioritized causes and presented solutions for each in an embedded browser. F-Tech pioneered the architecture for subsequent applications. New or modified technical service support knowledge could be quickly incorporated for distribution to other technical service support personnel: new logic was added by changing the knowledge-base, while the information (descriptions of problems, causes, and solutions) was modified by editing HTML files. F-Tech demonstrated the ability of the technology to provide more responsive, accurate, and cost-effective service support.

R-Tech: Advisor for High Density Foam Manufacture

The second working prototype was developed to help technical service support personnel trouble-shoot problems encountered in the manufacture of rigid foam products. Like F-Tech, R-Tech also isolated the causes of problems and suggested (prioritized) solutions. However, a variety of improvements were added to the underying architecture (and F-Tech upgraded). Separate HTML files (rather than embedded) were maintained for each problem, cause and solution to permit full cross-referencing of information. The results of sessions, and information entered in Quality Control forms (used in F-Tech but not R-Tech) could be stored in external databases. A Query Modes was added which allowed the user to proceed through a fully interactive fault diagnosis rather than selecting a problem and exploring prioritized causes. This is useful for handling rare problems, especially for technicians in remote locations without easy access to help from their peers, or those with with less experience.

O-Tech: Advisor for Oriented Strand Board Manufacture

The final working prototype was developed to help technical service support personnel trouble-shoot problems encountered in the manufacture of oriented strandboard. Although covering a much larger set of problems and causes, O-Tech was developed in the R-Tech architecture with minor enhancements (e.g., allowing users to add their own notes to solutions, and to email suggestions directly from a problem/cause/solution to the application maintainer) which were subsequently provided for F-Tech and R-Tech.

Conclusion

The foam advisors were subsequently converted to completely web-based applications delivered from a central server in New Jersey. This facilitated both updating the applications and keeping pace with the rapid developments in browser technology (instead of using an embedded browser). ICI Polyurethanes was subsequently incorporated into Huntsman Chemicals.

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