A sense of scale

It is shown how the engineer´s sense of scale can be formally represented in a knowledge base. The approach taken is to represent engineering knowledge in terms of performance limits on classes of devices. This allows preliminary design decisions to be made quickly, restricting further search to a small region of the design space. This preliminary design can then be progressively refined until it is fully specified. Scaling has made it possible to develop an intelligent, CAD (computer-aided design) system that can perform conceptual-level design. An interactive design system using a constraint-based, object-oriented logic programming language called Echidna has been built