An application-based agenda for incorporating Operational Research OR into an AI design environment for facility design

As part of the present study of expert human problem solving in design, the authors devised and implemented the core of a workstation-based, graphics-intensive, intelligent support system for facilty planning and layout. The experience, in that endeavor, is that neither traditional AI nor current OR/MS approaches are adequate to provide a complete design support system, but that a hybrid system might be. In this paper, the authors describe how such a hybridization could occur. They identify points in the problem-solving process at which appropriate AI mechanisms can be brought to bear to assist in the selection, formulation, and interpretation of existing numeric (OR/MS) methods. The authors conclude that it will be necessary to relax traditional OR/MS assumptions about the nature of the facilty planning problem leg., that the problem is sequential, with facility specification followed by facility layout) and about the proper relationship between the designer/planner and the design tool. The non-sequential nature of facility design suggests that (a) a design support system will need to work in an interactive, as opposed to a batch, mode, (b) the design support system must be capable of formulating the problem to be solved as part of the solution process, as is done by the human expert, and (c) the burden of solving the problem should not be shifted to the system. Building and testing the hybrid system remains to be done.