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Even though AI technology is a relatively new discipline, many of its concepts have already found practical applications. Expert systems, in particular, have made significant contributions to technologies in such fields as business, medicine, engineering design, chemistry, and particle physics.

This paper describes an expert system developed to aid mechanical engineering designers in the preliminary design of variable-stroke internal-combustion engines. Variable-stroke engines are more economical in fuel consumption but their design is particularly difficult to accomplish. With the traditional design approach, synthesizing the mechanisms for the design is rather difficult and evaluating the mechanisms is an even more cumbersome and time-consuming effort. Our expert system assists the designer by generating and evaluating a large number of design alternatives represented in the form of graphs. Through the application of structural and design rules obtained from design experts to the graphs, good quality preliminary design configurations of the engines are promptly deduced. This approach can also be used in designing other types of mechanisms.