Intelligent Advisory System for Supporting Redesign

Abstract

It is the designer’s dream to be guided by decisions based on physical and mathematical modeling simulations, which are computationally intensive but offer immense insight into developing product. Nevertheless, dealing with these kinds of multi-disciplinary analyses is still a tremendous challenge. The main purpose of the intelligent consultative system for supporting analysis-based redesign, which is presented in this paper, is to engage with this challenge. The results of engineering analysis are often basic parameters for the optimization process. If the structure does not satisfy given criteria, certain optimization steps, such as redesign, have to be performed. Yet, the existing software still fails to provide any advice about these redesign steps. Thus, the selection of the appropriate redesign actions still depends mostly on the designer’s knowledge and experience. The idea for our research work was to collect, organize, and write this kind of knowledge and experience into a knowledge base of the intelligent system. The results of the expert evaluation of the system and some tests with real-life examples show that the prototype of the presented intelligent system can be applied either to design new products in practice or as an educational tool.

Keywords:

• structural analyses
• decision support
• knowledge-based systems
• Prolog