Toyota Motor Corporation and Toyota Central R&D have developed a knowledge-based system to generate meshes for finite element simulation e.g. for forging simulation. The system was announced with an award-winning presentation at the 9th International Conference on Industrial & Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence & Expert Systems.

According to Toyota, the system is ``applicable to various fields of computational dynamics with structured meshes. We analysed and modeled experts' mesh generation procedures in the simulation processes of forging deformations, vehicle aerodynamics and engine in-cylinder flows''.

``The characteristics of GENMAI are as follows: (1) Plural solutions can be efficiently obtained at the same time in the search phase, using the global dependency and local dependency. (2) The meta-level inference method and its knowledge representation method are applicable to various analysis fields. We have applied GENMAI to forging simulation, and found it to have a real prospect for practical use.''

The system is implemented in IF/Prolog, delivered by Itochu Techno Science with hardware from Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard.