Modeling the Shear Stiffness of Worsted Fabrics Using Soft Computing Techniques

The soft computing technique is used to model the relationship between the yarn properties, fabric parameters and shear stiffness of worsted fabrics. At first, the yarn properties and fabric parameters are selected by utilizing an input variable selection method. The first part of this method takes the human knowledge on the shear stiffness of fabrics into account. The second part utilizes a data sensitivity criterion based on a distance method. Then, the artificial neural network model of the relationship between the yarn properties, fabric parameters and shear stiffness of fabrics is established. The results show that the artificial neural network model yields accurate prediction and a reasonably good artificial neural network model can be achieved with relatively few data points by integrated with the input variable selecting method developed in this research.