Research on high creative application of case-based reasoning system on engineering design

Case-based reasoning (CBR) has shown significant superiority in creative application (innovation) in many areas, especially those strong in practice but poor in theory, such as engineering design. But existing CBR systems have poor semantic understanding, which seriously hampers their creative application. So this paper mainly focuses on the research of case retrieval of CBR system and proposes an intelligent case retrieval method by integrating ontology technology into CBR system. The proposed method has enough semantic understanding ability and can help designers find the desired case, from which designers can gain enlightenment and inspiration for developing new ideas. The work of this research is mainly that adopt the combination of two ontology acquisition means to improve domain knowledge acquisition and propose a new semantic retrieval method to improve semantic understanding of case retrieval. At last a kind of typical engineering design - injection mold design is taken an example to validate the proposed method and Lots of experiments are organized to test the performance and the results show that the proposed approach outperforms existing models. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.