XCODAMS: An Engineering Design SystemBased On Constraint Propagation
Edmund Burke, D.G. Elliman, M.I. Heard · WIT transactions on information and communication technologies · 1970
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 limited 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 intuitive 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 reduce solution spaces. It is assumed that the user will have a good idea of the kind of solution required and can add and remove constraints in an informed manner to work with the system and home in on a suitable solution.