A Study on the Optimum Design Using Symbolic Manipulation System

In conventional optimum design process, symbolic formulation of mathematical optimization problem usually must be done by the designers before numerical computation. And these pre-process tasks are sometimes tremendously hard and time consuming for the designers. In this paper, we will show a simplification of these pre-process tasks with an aid of symbolic manipulation systems which have been studied in the field of Artificial Intelligence. In almost existent symbolic manipulation systems, their main purposes being stressed on verifying the expression, the computer programs in the systems could not obtain any information directly from the operator during the excuting of the program. In this study, to reduce this disadvantage we use menu system as interactive computer system to define and decide the objective function and constraints freely. And, we applied a symbolic manupulation system to a formulation of the objective function and the constraints as well as to structural analysis by Energy method. Consideration have been given to the obtained optimum designs and the effectiveness was confirmed.