Evaluation and design: a knowledge-based approach

Abstract

The aim of this communication is to describe how aiding-design tools can evaluate designed solutions to help users make the best choices, avoid design mistakes and reduce the design time-cycle. First, we will compare the two main methods for aiding design—behaviour simulation tools and domain knowledge simulation tools—and look at their advantages and drawbacks. We will focus on tools based on knowledge because of their ‘interactivity’ and for their ability to represent domain knowledge and show how they can be extended to evaluate designed solutions. We will then concentrate on an aiding-design tool based on constraints and see how a solution can be evaluated using an evaluation function. As such a tool has already been developed as part of a European project to help metallurgists design and evaluate heat treatment operations, we end with the presentation of a real example.

Keywords:

• Evaluation of solutions
• Interactive aiding design
• Constraints
• Application

Acknowledgements

This work was partly funded by the European Commission through the IMS project. The authors wish to acknowledge the Commission for their support. We also wish to acknowledge our gratitude and appreciation to all the VHT project partners (especially EMTT (France), SCC (France), Metallographica (Spain), Scania (Sweden) and IWT (Germany)) for their contribution during the development of the various ideas and concepts presented in this paper. This paper is an extended version of that in the proceedings volume from the 12th IFAC International Symposium on Information Control Problems in Manufacturing (INCOM'06) (ISBN: 978-0-08-044654-7, Elsevier Science, Saint Etienne, France, December 2006).