Research Initiation: A Knowledge-Based Methodology for Composite Products Design

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This award is to support the design of composite objects and blends with desired properties is an important and diffi- cult process in the industry. Industries are the key and emerging technological areas such as novel materials, specialty chemicals, biotechnology and pharmaceutical, etc. critically depend on accurate, efficient, innovative and rapid design of new products that satisfy functional and processing constraints in order to compete effectively in a changing international market. This class of design problems encompasses a wide vari- ety of products such as polymeric composites and blends, cera- mics, alloys, drugs, solvents, paints and varnishes, etc., that amount to tens of billions of dollars in sales every year in the United States alone. In order to understand this design process and to develop a design methodology that can be formalized and automated, a knowledge-based framework will be developed. This methodology approaches design as a constrained knowledge-guided search by modeling the design sub-space interactions as a hierarchy of operators that cause motion in the search space. Knowledge represented in a hybrid form of frames, rules, and procedures. Flexible control of reasoning is facilitated by using a combina- tion of weak methods, namely, generate-and-test and means-ends- analysis. A blackboard architecture will be developed to imple- ment this design methodology. The methodology should lead to a design environment that will facilitate rapid exploration of preliminary design candidates.