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Information with uncertainty and imprecision is inherently presented in engineering design and manufacturing. The nature of uncertainty and imprecision is incompleteness. The incompleteness is a typical feature in earlier product design phases. Product design is essentially viewed as a process of reducing the incompleteness in the description of conceptual design. Some methods and strategies for the preliminary engineering design, calculation, and modeling in relational database systems have been proposed to process imprecise and uncertain information. Product data model, being a core of intelligent manufacturing system, consists of all concerned data in the product life cycle. EXPRESS-G is a powerful tool to develop a product data model. This paper extends the EXPRESS-G to make it possible to represent information with uncertainty and imprecision.

Information with imprecision and uncertainty is inherently presented in engineering design and manufacturing. The nature of imprecision and uncertainty is incompleteness. Product data model, being a core of intelligent manufacturing system, consists of all concerned data in the product life cycle. It is possible that crisp data as well as incomplete data are involved in product data model. So EXPRESS, being a powerful tool to develop a product data model, should be extended for this purpose. This paper extends the data types in EXPRESS to make it possible to represent fuzzy information.