Intelligent systems for engineering design and configuration problems

This article describes an approach to engineering design and configuration problems which was developed in order to enrich existing design and configuration support systems with more intelligent abilities. The main idea is to integrate knowledge-based methods with multi-criteria decision making and fuzzy logic. Such hybrid type systems show some important advantages, e.g. object oriented and declarative type of knowledge representation, making design or configuration decisions by solving a multi-criteria decision making problem and dealing with imprecision by using several concepts of fuzzy logic. The concepts and approaches have been implemented in the KONWERK modular tool kit for engineering design and configuration problems. We will focus on the description of imprecision in KONWERK, in particular on the Fuzzy MADM module of KONWERK, and we will illustrate our approach using the application ‘preliminary design of future space launch systems’.