A reasoning method for a ship design expert system

The ship design process is a highly data-oriented, dynamic, iterative and multi-stage algorithm. It utilizes multiple abstraction levels and concurrent engineering techniques. Specialized techniques for knowledge acquisition, knowledge representation and reasoning must be developed to solve these problems for a ship design expert system. Consequently, very few attempts have been made to model the ship design process using an expert system approach. The current work investigates a knowledge representation-reasoning technique for such a purpose. A knowledge-based conceptual design was developed by utilizing a prototype approach and hierarchical decompositioning. An expert system program called ALDES (accommodation layout design expert system) was developed by using the CLIPS expert system shell and an object-oriented user interface. The reasoning and knowledge representation methods of ALDES are explained in the paper. An application of the method is given for the general arrangement design of a containership.