Constraint Explorer A Modelling and Sizing Tool For Engineering Design

摘要

Interval Constraint Programming becomes an efficient paradigm for solving systems of non linear real equations and inequalities. Many authors have pointed out the potential interest of the approach for engineering design issues and more recently some of them have even made design experiments with various constraint programming systems. The results are quite encouraging and tend to demonstrate the suitability of the approach. However the existing tools suffer from weaknesses and shortcomings which prevent them to fill in the existing gap between a laboratory experimentation and an effective application on industrial design problems.rnAware of the current technological limitations, Dassault Aviation has investigated for more than five years the ways to maintain the interesting properties related to the paradigm in a software environment supplying the modelling and solving methods required for engineering design. The result is a software system called Constraint Explorer (CE) with a software architecture developed to fit at the best with design issues. CE has been successfully applied on real engineering problems.