Challenges and pressures from the growing globalisation of markets have made automotive enterprises shorten produce development cycle time and reduce costs throughthe increasing use of mathematics-based tools and processes. In order to bridge the gap between experience-based design and science-based engineering, this paper establishes a knowledge-based process planning system to fully support auto panel die devel-opment and design automation. The framework of this novel system, knowledge representation and knowledge-based design are desribed in detail. The function model of te system is proposed to illustrate the architecture and functiondlity of the system. The system provieds users with just-in-time access to the appropiate knowledge and information to reduce the search burden. A practial example is used to show the great advvantage of the knowledge-based process planning system.