Author(s)

E.K. Burke, D.G. Elliman & M.I. Heard

Abstract

XCODAMS: An engineering design system based on constraint propagation E.K. Burke, D.G. Elliman & M.I. Heard Department of Computer Science, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham, ABSTRACT The investigation of engineering design problems inevitably involves searching through extremely large solution spaces. The designer has to make decisions about the product that is being designed so that it satisfies a large amount of constants. These constraints are not lim- ited to engineering equations but range from fundamental formulae to financial restrictions. The problem of automatically finding solutions to these problems is nearly always intractable because of the size of the search spaces. The designer necessarily adopts a strategy of intui- tive guesswork which is unlikely to result in an optimal solution. In this paper, we describe a powerful and useful engineering design system based on constraint propagation methods. It can quickly explore and re

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