Intelligent computer-aided design systems: past 20 years and future 20 years

摘要

Triggered by expert systems technology, artificial intelligence (AI) was a silver bullet in the early 1980s. AI seemed to be able to perfectly solve various problems that involved any intellectual activities. For instance, MYCIN (Short-life, 1976), developed at Stanford, gave a strong impression that medical doctors could have been soon supported by a clever consultation system, resulting in more accurate diagnoses. Inspired by these, also in engineering fields, a variety of experimental systems for fault diagnosis, planning, selection, and design were developed, which demonstrated promising possibilities of their applications. In 1983 I coined the term intelligent CAD, which had been called expert CAD or knowledge-based CAD until then (Tomiyama & Yoshikawa, 1983). An epoch-making event was a conference organized by IFIP Working Group 5.2 in 1984, entitled Knowledge Engineering in CAD (Gero, 1985), at which many (mostly non-US) researchers active at that time presented their systems. In 1987 Working Group 5.2 organized a follow-up conference entitled Expert Systems in CAD (Gero, 1987). Following these, Eurographics organized a series of workshops between 1987 and 1990 (ten Hagen & Tomiyama, 1987; Akman et al., 1989; Barthes, 1990; ten Hagen & Veerkamp, 1991) and IFIP Work Group 5.2 ran workshops between 1987 and 1991 (Yoshikawa & Gossard, 1989; Yoshikawa & Holden, 1990; Yoshikawa & Arbab, 1991).