On the development of a knowledge-based design support system for energy absorbers

Energy absorbers (EA) dissipate kinetic energy during impact or intense dynamic loading. They have been widely used in a variety of industrial and engineering applications. To design EAs, the conventional approach uses “trial and error” iterations, which hence may be very time consuming. To improve the design methodology, a knowledge-based design support system is proposed in this paper. With this system, designers can obtain the optimal design directly with the EA knowledge base by using intelligent rule-based reasoning techniques. On the other hand, when no data are available for reasoning, the knowledge base can provide a calculation tool to generate the design result. In addition, the relevant supporting knowledge is integrated in the system in the form of real-time images, text and video demonstration to support the decision-making task.