In these days of world-wide business environment, the characteristics of quality management are variety, specialty, decentralization, totality, etc. Thus nowadays quality management is demanded to incorporate these new concepts. We propose a web-bused distributed expert system for this purpose. The system consists of four expert systems for design of experiment, acceptance inspection, statistical process control and reliability management corresponding to design quality, incoming-material quality, manufacturing quality and usability quality, respectively, throughout the total product life cycle. Each distributed expert system at the horizontal level in the hierarchy carries out its own quality jobs independently. At the lower level in the hierarchy there is an expert system for measurement analysis to provide reliable data, and at the upper level, an expert system for total quality management to coordinate, integrate and make final decisions. A prototype has been developed and its application is presented. |