Abstract

Within the last two decades, a substantial amount of research efforts has been directed at the application of Soft Computing (SC) techniques in engineering. This paper provides a systematic review of the literature emanating from these efforts with particular focus on materials engineering. The primary aim is to provide background information, motivation for applications and an exposition to the methodologies employed in the development of soft computing technologies in engineering. Our review shows that all the works on the application of SC to materials engineering have reported excellent, good, positive or at least encouraging results. In our opinion, the lack of negative results might be due to the simplification of materials engineering problems to manageable and predictable situations. We draw particular attention to the strengths and weaknesses of soft computing techniques in the context of materials engineering applications. Our appraisal of the literature suggests that the interface between materials engineering and intelligent systems engineering techniques, such as soft computing, is still blur. The need to formalise the computational and intelligent systems engineering methodology used in materials engineering, therefore, arises. We also provide a brief exposition to our on-going efforts in this direction. Although our study focuses on materials engineering in particular, we think that our findings applies to other areas of engineering as well.

Key words: Composite materials, fuzzy logic, soft computing, intelligent systems engineering,formal methods.