A blackboard architecture for plastics design

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Abstract

Engineering design is a complex, ill-structured problem involving vast amounts of knowledge that often deal with incomplete, and uncertain, information. The design process typically involves a number of sub-tasks, some of which are amenable to numeric or algorithmic processing (e.g., analysis and optimization); most other sub-tasks require symbolic processing, and are typically solved by expert designers who rely on experiential knowledge used in the form of heuristics. The latter set of sub-tasks were chiefly responsible for creating the symbolic bottleneck that has set back the efforts to automate the design process. However, with the advent of recent AI methodologies we now have techniques for tackling the symbolic bottleneck. Even though some progress has been made in this area with the aid of knowledge-based expert systems, many important questions still remain to be research. In the DESIGNER project we are performing empirical studies that focus on these questions using the plastics design problem as our test bed. We have focused on the preliminary or the base-case design in this domain and have implemented a working prototype called DESIGNER, based on the blackboard architecture. This paper discusses the various aspects of DESIGNER, which is a hybrid, integrated, conferring expert system (HICEX). We are currently extending DESIGNER's capabilities to address the other aspects of the plastics design problem such as part design, plastics processing selection, etc. We are also investigating decentralized communication architectures for integrating multiple experts on the design problem.

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