ABSTRACT
Equipment selection is a complex and time consuming process which requires a number of important decisions to be made and a large number of inter-related factors to be taken into account (Kochhar and Pegler, 1991). Many of the difficulties faced when attempting to formalise the decision making logic for equipment selection arise from the need to transform information, at several levels, between closely inter-related domains of components, manufacturing processes and manufacturing resources used for their production. Knowledge
integration to facilitate transformations between the three domains is one of the crucial issues to be addressed during development of equipment selection systems.
