The architecture and implementation of a mechanical designer's assistant shell called DEJAVU is presented. The architecture is based on an integration of design and CAD with some of the more well known concepts in case-based reasoning (CBR). DEJAVU provides a flexible and cognitively intuitive approach for acquiring and utilizing design knowledge. It is a domain independent mechanical design shell that can incrementally acquire design knowledge in the domain of the user. DEJAVU provides a design environment that can learn from the designer(s) until it can begin to perform design tasks autonomously or semi-autonomously. The main components of DEJAVU are a knowledge base of design plans, an evaluation module in the form of a design plan system, and a blackboard-based adaptation module. The existance of these components are derived from the utilization of a CBR architecture. DEJAVU is the first step in developing a robust designer's assistant shell for mechanical design problems. One of the major contributions of DEJAVU is the development of a clean architecture for the utilization of case-based reasoning in a mechanical designer's assistant shell. In addition, the components of the architecture have been developed, tailored or modified from a general CBR context into a more synergistic relationship with mechanical design.
Case-based design (CBD) systems aim to solve a design problem by tailoring previously solved design problems to the current problem. Designers' specifications are used for indexing the knowledge base of the CBD system to retrieve an appropriate design case. Menu-based systems fail to capture designers' specifications effectively due to lack of expressiveness, while natural language systems are too immature to satisfy the goal. This paper presents the development of a graphical user interface (GUI) to implement a mechanical design specification language (MDSL) (Stelling, 1994) used to facilitate indexing in case-based mechanical design. The specification language is context-free and hence computable. It represents mechanical design knowledge in a
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