Constraint Satisfaction Problem for Case-Based Reasoning Adaptation: Application in Process Design

Process design represents a complex domain where past experiences are often used to solve new design problems. Currently in the Artificial intelligence field and more particularly in Knowledge Management some techniques arise in order to accelerate the entire design process. Among these methods Case Based Reasoning is emerging as an efficient approach to deal with this challenge, allowing to store previous design cases to help for solving new problems and reducing considerably the design time. However existing cases must be adapted to new problem situation. In this article we deal with the case adaptation problem and we propose an improvement of CBR using a Constraints Satisfaction Problem approach applied to the early phase of process design.