TR033: Automatic Selection of Components (ASCO)

The selection of components for construction, buildings, and process plants is made by experts today. The selection of components for power plants, for example, is a very important task because the cost of components is half of that for the whole power plant and because the reliability of a power plant depends greatly on the reliability of the single components. The selection methods currently used by experts has worked well within the structure of a conventional design process. The few experts have had time to do the selection during the long design time. However, today several universities and companies are developing new methods to design and build process plants more efficiently. This means that the components have to be selected early in the preliminary design stage of the project. Using current procedures, it is difficult for the various experts to select components and produce all the paperwork needed. In this paper I suggest that Expert System Technology be applied to component selection and that component selection be more tightly integrated into the preliminary design process.

In the second section of this paper I describe the requirements for component selection. The selection of components today is time-consuming team work; I present how it takes place today in the third section. Next, I suggest a new selection method based on Expert System Technology. In Section 5, I show how the Automatic Selection of Components (AS CO) method will be run in the computer environment. The last section presents conclusions and suggestions for future research.