Proposing Kitchen Designs: A Case-Based Reasoning Approach

This thesis is motivated by an idea at Compusoft—a software company that develops a computer-aided design program to design kitchens. The idea is to reuse existing designs so that the system can propose possible solutions for a new kitchen. Case-based reasoning is a methodology within artificial intelligence that solves a new problem based on its experience—the main idea is that similar problems have similar solutions. In this thesis, however, the extended case-based reasoning view is used. This means, one measures the utility of a solution to a given problem. It is reasonable to believe that this approach has a great potential to propose kitchen designs. This thesis describes what case-based reasoning is and specifically its application in design. Additionally, it investigates related research in automatic furnishing and decision support systems in design. This thesis does not only describe a theoretical solution that is likely to work in practice—a working prototype is demonstrated and analyzed