Evolving design cases

The use of case based reasoning techniques for design has been growing during the last few years. One of the features of case based design (CBD) is that both modified designs and completely new designs can be incorporated in the case database in exactly the same way. This leads to the development of corporate databases of good designs. We consider how evolutionary methods may be applied to the adaptation process. This work is still at a very early stage and is really intended to highlight the areas where we believe flexibility and evolution are required. We therefore give an overview of our initial ideas. It is important to note that we are concentrating on the issue of developing a CBD system which will evolve with the requirements of the user, and will also allow selected cases to be modified by cases representing desired features. The specific design case considered is applied to the construction industry