A surface level expert system has been developed to judge the feasibility of automating the design of new non-standard product routings. The main goal in this domain is to design or plan an appropriate sequence of processing units to be used in the manufacture of non-standard products. Each product order has associated with it a description of the desired steel product based on a range of mechanical and metallurgical features such as width, thickness, surface finish, hardness, coating type, and so on