A case-based reasoning system for mechanical design

Mechanical design, mainly depending on the expert experience, is a complicated, uncertain and unstructured activity. Although mechanical products can be designed by skilled designers, the design process is still time-consuming and experience-dependent. To solve this problem, this paper develops a system applying case-based reasoning (CBR) methodology to support mechanical design process. In the CBR system, the case-base is divided into two parts, one is standard case-base and the other is design case-base, which can improve the matching efficiency of the standardization parts. A retrieval algorithm integrated with the clustering technique is proposed to locate the similar cases in the case-base. In addition, a test case-base is proposed to illustrate the feasibility of the CBR system.