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Recently, I've been looking recently into what uses AI - specifically evolutionary algorithms - may have in automating engineering design. For a long time, there have been algorithms that solve constraint satisfaction problems, and, to me, it makes sense to consider engineering problems as a superset of constraint satisfaction problems. In spite of this, I haven't been able to find any cases of engineering design being automated other than a couple of cases of genetic algorithms being used to optimise structural members.

So my question is, why can't I find any examples?

The first thing that springs to mind is that I just haven't been looking hard enough - if this is the case, could anyone point me in the right direction?

The other obvious answer is that it isn't a widely researched area - if so, why not? Is it just due to lack of interest or are there technical hurdles (abstraction, complex logic & reasoning, etc.) that make this a much more difficult problem than computer vision, games, and so on?

nbro
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QuadraticOne
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1 Answers1

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Examples of GA implementations:

  1. NASA’s spacecraft evolved antenna
  2. Solution for TSP with a big number of connections. Here is an example with Python and here with C#.
  3. From my experience, GA can be even used for a training of small artificial neural networks, but with less efficiency than with traditional deep learning approaches

Also, I heard about successful projects with using GA for scheduling, packing and logistics

Therefore, everything, that can be represented in a form of digital chromosomes (can be serialized to and deserialized back from a sequence of bits) and we can define a function to evaluate its efficiency – fitness or reward function can be optimized by using of GA

nbro
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Stepan Novikov
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