Application of analogical planning to engineering design

The analogical graph matching (ANAGRAM) system, which performs analogical planning using a graph-match technique, is described. Given a target problem specification, ANAGRAM finds a similar problem from the database from which a solution can be derived. The difficulties that arise when an analogy fails because the base case is only partially applicable to the current problem are addressed. ANAGRAM offers a solution to this problem by merging the graphs representing several similar base cases, resulting in a virtual base graph that generalizes the individual cases enough to cover a target problem. Three examples that illustrate the use of analogy planning and graph merging in the domain of automatic programming are presented. The techniques described can similarly be applied to tasks in a variety of complex domains