Integration of Multiple Knowledge Sources in ALADIN: An Alloy Design System

ALADIN' is a knowledge-based system that aids metallurgists in the design of new aluminum alloys. Alloy design is characterized by creativity, intuition and conceptual reasoning. The application of artificial intelligence to this domain poses a number of challenges, including: how to focus the search, how to deal with subproblem interactions, how to integrate multiple, incomplete design models and how to represent complex, metallurgical structure knowledge. In this paper, our approach to dealing with these problems is described.