Intelligent approach to a CAD system for the layout design of a ship engine room

Abstract

The current layout design of a ship engine room not only depends on a skilled designer but also has many design constraints and regulations to be considered. At preliminary design stage CAD systems need to be intelligent in the sense that they must be able to use knowledge to achieve the designer's goal. In this paper, we present an approach to implement a practical knowledge-based system for the machinery layout design of a ship engine room. The knowledge-base is implemented and verified in the actual CAD environment of a ship engine room, named MADES (Machinery Arrangement Design Expert System), which we develop in this study. Design knowledge is represented by object-oriented concept, and nonmonotonic reasoning enables the values of closely related objects to be consistent. The approaches presented in this paper provide a practical example of a knowledge-based system for complex design problems, and call also provide guidance on implementing an integrated design expert system that extends the capability of existing CAD systems. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.