Characteristics of an effective design plan system to support reuse in case-based mechanical design

Design plan systems play an important role in applying case-based reasoning (CBR) to mechanical design. They are responsible for the representation and evaluation of design plans. Design plans are stored as the actual cases in the case base of a CBR system. In this paper, we discuss design reuse and related open issues: plan modification and plan adaptation. It is shown that these issues need to utilize design knowledge associated with both design procedure and design rationale. An overview of current design systems is given. These design systems have not been able to address the issues associated with design reuse. This has, in effect, made them unsuitable for use in a robust CBR system for mechanical design. Based on this discussion, this paper presents the characteristics of an effective design plan system to support reuse in case-based mechanical design. It is concluded that a design plan system should be a mixture of both the design procedure model and the design rationale model. An implementation of such a design plan system is presented with an example. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.