Materials failure analysis utilizing rule-case based hybrid reasoning method

Materials failure problems are becoming a serious concern because there would be a variety of consequences possibly affecting public safety. Therefore, materials failure analysis is needed to find out the reason of failure and avoid similar failures' reoccurring. However, materials failure cases mostly rely on manual analysis by experts with sufficient domain knowledge, leading to the situation of time-consuming, low efficiency and difficult evaluation. This paper proposes a rule-case based hybrid reasoning approach for materials failure analysis with the aid of ontology. Hundreds of materials failure cases from different industries were collected and analyzed by rule-based reasoning, case-based reasoning and our hybrid method. It is demonstrated that the rule-case based hybrid reasoning method can obviously provide better analysis results in comparison with rule-based reasoning and case-based reasoning alone.