INTELLIGENT APPROACH TO A CAD-SYSTEM FOR THE LAYOUT DESIGN OF A SHIP ENGINE ROOM

The current layout design of a ship engine room not only depends on a skilled designer but also has many design constraints and regulations to be considered. At preliminary design stage CAD systems need to be i ntelligent in the sense that they must be able to use knowledge to ach ieve the designer's goal. In this paper, we present an approach to imp lement a practical knowledge-based system for the machinery layout des ign of a ship engine room. The knowledge-base is implemented and verif ied in the actual CAD environment of a ship engine room, named MADES ( Machinery Arrangement Design Expert System), which we develop in this study. Design knowledge is represented by object-oriented concept, and nonmonotonic reasoning enables the values of closely related objects to be consistent. The approaches presented in this paper provide a pra ctical example of a knowledge-based system for complex design problems , and call also provide guidance on implementing an integrated design expert system that extends the capability of existing CAD systems. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.