1. I NTRODUCTION The emerging field of composite materials offers one pivotal area for the establishment of a revitalized American industrial base. There is a key enabling step for realizing this potential in which artificial intelligence (AI) may prove to be important: enabling a rapid “specifications to manufacturing” time; i.e. shortening the time between setting material specifications, and suc- cessful commercial manufacturing of a material meeting those specifications. Page 1 of 29 Fabricating Composite Materials: A Comprehensive Problem Solving Architecture Based on a Generic Task Viewpoint Jon Sticklen & Ahmed Kamel Martin Hawley & V. Adegbite AI/KBS Lab–CPS Dept Composite Materials and Structures Center Michigan State University Division of Engineering Research East Lansing, MI 48824 Michigan State University sticklen@pleiades.cps.msu.edu East Lansing, MI 48824 Abstract Fabrication of advanced composite materials will be a pivotal industrial activity in the twenty first century. Over the last three years we have conducted collaborative re- search aimed at applying artificial intelligence techniques to selected design and fab- rication problems in the composites materials area. More particularly, we have exer- cised and extended techniques drawn from the Generic Task framework for task spe- cific architectures to produce problem solving frameworks for solving (a) design of thermoset/thermoplastic epoxy-resin materials, and (b) fabrication monitoring and control for advanced microwave curing of thin section epoxy-resin materials. More recently, we have developed a comprehensive PS architecture for the “composite ma- terials design and fabrication lifecycle.” In this report, we first describe our newly de- veloped PS architecture for the composites design/fabrication lifecycle. We then go on to illustrate two of the components of this architecture by describing our two run- ning prototype systems, both of which have produced encouraging results. We con- clude with a discussion of related work in other laboratories, and future work being planned in our laboratories.This paper is both a position paper on a proposed problem solving architecture for a significant industrial problem, and a report on two working computer system which are implementations of components of the proposed architec- ture.