Development of aircraft-design material-selection expert system

Following a discussion on aircraft-design material-selection, a browser/service architecture framework of materials selection expert system, together with its implementation and prototype, was put forward. The system integrated rule-based reasoning, case-based reasoning and model-based method, and it could reason with a general inference engine. The inference engine's function was implemented by a popular expert system development tool-C language integrated production system(CLIPS). When this system functioned, it worked in these three steps: reasoning for qualitative selection results, searching materials from material database and ranking the materials to obtain a selection result. User could access the system with browsers conveniently. Its effectiveness was demonstrated by a case of wing-spar materials-selection.