Expert Systems For Conceptual Mechanical Design

This paper introduces an expert system for the conceptual design of a specific class of mechanical system, the overhead crane. The expert system is developed from the author\u27s theory of conceptual mechanical engineering design. In practice, the user provides a set of specifications and then the system reasons according to the knowledge built into the system to find solution(s) without human intervention. This process is much like assigning a design task to a human engineer: based upon the given requirements to the engineer, he or she works on the problem and then submits one or more possible solutions