ASA: A conceptual design-support system

This paper proposes a computational architecture for conceptual design support that integrates typical CAD editing activities with symbolic information processing. The architecture is composed of a knowledge representation server and a variational CAD system. The knowledge-representation sewer is based on a terminological language which is expressive enough to represent the knowledge involved in a design process, and to support the typical inferences used in a case-based design-support system. The knowledge-representation server contains both episodic knowledge, stored as cases in a long-term memory and general domain knowledge. It supports the usual strategies of case-based design-support systems as case retrieval and case adaptation. The variational CAD environment processes the geometric information. The variational approach to the geometric representation of domain elements separates the metric aspects from the topological aspects of design artefacts. As a consequence, inferences on topology can be performed at a symbolic level, obtaining an increased integration between geometric and symbolic knowledge. The system is part of the ASA project, under development at the University of Ancona. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.