The Development of ALADIN, and Expert System for Aluminum Alloy Design

ALADIN is an expert system that aids metallurgists in the design of new aluminum alloys. The project began in January 1984, and two major iterations of the system design have been completed. The current system is a hybrid of several approaches and artificial intelligence techniques. Declarative representations are used for metallurgical data and concepts. The basic design procedure is encoded in a rule-based, with the potential for flexible control and participation by the user. The system is based on the hypothesize-and-test model, and a constraint-based search is used to find alternative designs. Strategies are included for resolving the interactions and trade-offs among conflicting property targets. Metallurgical relationships cover a broad range of symbolic and numerical types of reasoning, which are integrated in t he system. In this article, an o\vervicw of the project is given, including discussions of knowledge acquisition techniques, design decisions and implementation.