IPA Concepts and Applications in Engineering [Paperback]

In professional practice, many designers collect and maintain personal notes as guidelines about experiences and insights for handling technical problems and design situations. An intelligent personal assistant (IPA) can act as a database for these notes, making the entire design process more efficient. Based on real industrial procedures, this book contains practical examples for professionals and students interested in real implementations of knowledge based systems in engineering. It integrates two major ideas: a computer system integrating computer design tools and a computer system fulfilling the role of an intelligent personal assistant. This user-friendly approach to the main ideas, concepts and techniques shows how an IPA can serve as a significant and fruitful knowledge based technique in engineering design.

This book presents the results of extensive research in computer-supported decision processes in engineering,carried out over many years by the author and his coll- orators. The author has cooperated with designers in Poland and in Germany. Very often there was universityindustry cooperation for the building of speci?c so- ware for certain engineering tasks. The majority of the concepts,for example the designers personal assistantand the decomposition and coordination of multicriteria decision problems, evolved through cooperation with designers in this ?eld. The author,while working together with them,understood that this group of people is characterised by a strong in- vidualism and that the range of applied approaches and methods is wide. The most signi?cant in?uences on the authors opinions through contact with the designers were the lectures he delivered for more than 12 years for post-graduate studies on computer-aided design in machinery. The lectures included seminars which required the creation of concepts for an individual computer support system for decision processes,generally well known to the designers who participatl#-