COMPOSER - A CASE-BASED REASONING SYSTEM FOR ENGINEERING DESIGN

The frequent use of past experience by human engineers when solving ne w problems has led to an interest in the use of case based reasoning ( CBR) to help automate engineering design. In engineering design it oft en occurs that many past experiences must be combined to solve a new p roblem, and thus the process of case based adaptation must efficiently and systematically combine information from many sources. We have dev eloped a constraint based methodology for case combination that allows its application across a wide range of problems. We have shown that o ur approach provides an efficient adaptation methodology that ensures convergence upon a solution if one exists, provides a uniform represen tation of cases, and is generalizable beyond just one domain. Our tech nique is implemented in a case based reasoning system called COMPOSER, which has been tested in two design domains: assembly sequence design and configuration design.