【正文】
at the lowest cost. For the purpose of material selection, thousands of data would be needed to characterize all the grades of materials. Many selection systems are available to help design engineers to choose the most suitable materials. At the most basic level, design engineers could use tables of material properties in data books. However, data sheets are inplete and once published, they are difficult to update. Dodd and Fairfull [2] described how information about engineering materials, can be divided into two main categories, . data and knowledge. Data is defined as the results of measurements, whereas knowledge represents the connections between items of data, the source of this knowledge, which contributes to an understanding of the results. Both the puterized database and the KBS of material selection will be described in the following sections. 2. The material database for materials selection . Supporting data and rigorous logic for the hypothesis and obseruation In recent years, attention is being made to the use of puter systems to store and process data regarding the properties of materials. It enables the designers to achieve large capacity and rapid retrieval from a puter database to provide easy access to the materials data. According to Prasad [3], materials are the mon elements enumerating parts in a product realization process. Nowadays, design engineers normally rely on the materials that they are familiar with. However, when design requirements exceed the constraints of such materia