A case-based design aid for conceptual design of aircraft subsystems

This paper describes MIDAS (a memory for initial design of aircraft subsystems), a system that applies insights and techniques from case-based reasoning (CBR) to aid engineers in the design of utility subsystems early in the development of a new aircraft concept. Our goal is to demonstrate the usefulness and practicality of a particular approach to building a corporate design memory. MIDAS is an instance of a general class of systems we call Case-Based Design Aids (CBDAs). A CBDA provides a designer with convenient access to multimedia presentations that highlight the outstanding good and bad points of previous designs. MIDAS was developed as a joint project of the Georgia Tech AI Lab and Lockheed Aeronautical Systems Company's Advanced Design Division. It is the first CBDA to be built largely by domain experts; the AI team primarily provided an (evolving) tool kit, and advice.<>