Inventory management using constraint satisfaction and knowledge refinement techniques

British Aerospace is a member of the Airbus consortium with responsibility for the design and manufacture of wings for Airbus aircraft. During the con struction of these wings, fasteners are used to join two or more parts toge ther. However, a large number of different fasteners are currently used and handling this diverse range, with each type of fastener possibly having di fferent tooling systems, is expensive. Ways are therefore being sought to r educe the fastener inventory. This paper discusses a system which attempts to aid in this process. The system makes use of constraint satisfaction tec hniques to retrieve fasteners which are suitable for a particular applicati on, given a body of design knowledge. The system also incorporates a refine ment mechanism which is able to correct faulty knowledge in response to ina ppropriate fasteners being retrieved or correct fasteners not being retriev ed. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.