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

该奖项旨在支持复合材料对象和具有所需性能的混合物的设计，这是工业中重要而困难的过程。工业是关键和新兴技术领域，如新材料，特种化学品，生物技术和制药等，严重依赖于准确，高效，创新和快速设计的新产品，以满足功能和加工限制，以便在不断变化的国际市场中有效竞争。这类设计问题涉及各种各样的产品，如聚合复合材料和混合物、陶瓷、合金、药物、溶剂、油漆和清漆等，每年仅在美国就有数百亿美元的销售额。为了理解这个设计过程并开发一种可以形式化和自动化的设计方法，将开发一个基于知识的框架。该方法通过将设计子空间交互建模为在搜索空间中引起运动的操作符的层次结构，将设计作为受约束的知识引导搜索。以框架、规则和程序的混合形式表示的知识。通过使用弱方法的组合，即生成-测试和手段-目的分析，促进了推理的灵活控制。我们将开发一个黑板架构来实现这个设计方法。该方法应该导致一个设计环境，将促进初步候选设计的快速探索。

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.