The main objectives of this research are to develop a design retrieval system to facilitate associative memory that could retrieve similar designs instead of "identical" designs, a flexible mechanism for designers to determine the extent of reference designs corresponding to similarity measures, and a design representation which would relate to manufacturing processes. Preliminary studies show that Fuzzy ART network can be successfully utilized as a design associative memory that retrieves similar geometric designs from a database. A vigilance parameter in the learning procedure can be used as the similarity parameter to adjust the number of retrieved designs. It also demonstrates an ability to accommodate a certain degree of incomplete query input.
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