An approach to case-based system for conceptual ship design assistant

Designers heavily depend on their experience and existing ship data, when designing a skip. In preliminary design stage especially, decision making based on the designer's expertise and heuristic knowledge are very important factors to design process because available information is limited, and cannot be fully supported by formal design procedure and design sheet. To support these conceptual design environment, the designer's experience and heuristic knowledge are transformed into readable formats which can be operated on computer systems. The existing ship data are very useful and important in conceptual design. To use this data efficiently, it requires basically database of the existing ships and make practical application of it. In this article, intelligent system that can be a support to the conceptual design stage based on knowledge engineering was developed. Major design factors and parameters of the existing skip data were stored case base as design cases and the case base was connected with database for information exchange among them [Brown, A., Watson, I., & Filer, N. (1995). Separating the cases from the data: towards more flexible case-based reasoning. Proc. of International Conference on Case-Based Reasoning 95 (ICCBR-95), Sesimbra in Portugal]. To extract a good and suitable design case for a new ship design from case base, learning algorithm was adapted. The obtained knowledge from designers was used to compensate for the differences between the design case and a new design. The developed interactive intelligent conceptual design system (BASCON-IV) can be applied to commercial ships and bulk carriers. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.