Inventory management using constraint satisfaction and knowledge refinement techniques

British Aerospace is a member of the Airbus consortium with responsibility for the design and manufacture of wings for Airbus aircraft. During the construction of these wings, fasteners are used to join two or more parts together. However, a large number of different fasteners are currently used and handling this diverse range, with each type of fastener possibly having different tooling systems, is expensive. Ways are therefore being sought to reduce the fastener inventory. This paper discusses a system which attempts to aid in this process. The system makes use of constraint satisfaction techniques to retrieve fasteners which are suitable for a particular application, given a body of design knowledge. The system also incorporates a refinement mechanism which is able to correct faulty knowledge in response to inappropriate fasteners being retrieved or correct fasteners not being retrieved. © 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.