Knowledge-Based Support for Adhesive Selection: Will it Stick?
This work addresses the need for more flexible and comprehensive adhesive selection tools for industry experts, though it is incremental as it builds on existing knowledge-based approaches.
The paper tackles the problem of selecting suitable adhesives in industry by developing a knowledge-based tool that formalizes expert knowledge and uses reasoning to assist users, with validation showing experts believe it saves time and finds better adhesives.
As the popularity of adhesive joints in industry increases, so does the need for tools to support the process of selecting a suitable adhesive. While some such tools already exist, they are either too limited in scope, or offer too little flexibility in use. This work presents a more advanced tool, that was developed together with a team of adhesive experts. We first extract the experts' knowledge about this domain and formalize it in a Knowledge Base (KB). The IDP-Z3 reasoning system can then be used to derive the necessary functionality from this KB. Together with a user-friendly interactive interface, this creates an easy-to-use tool capable of assisting the adhesive experts. To validate our approach, we performed user testing in the form of qualitative interviews. The experts are very positive about the tool, stating that, among others, it will help save time and find more suitable adhesives. Under consideration in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP).