Artificial intelligence support for systems engineering

Artificial intelligence provides the means to represent and model domain concepts and provides an associated reasoning mechanism for use in decision making. Systems concepts are useful in dealing with complexity and have provided the means by which models and methodologies can be formalised and used in the solution of problems existing within industry and commerce. A methodology for product and process modelling is outlined, as a prerequisite to specific product configuration and production planning. The methodology is based on an object-based decomposition of component hierarchies, with each identifiable sub-component represented as semantic objects within a systems framework