Development of expert system for optimum design of stiffness of laminated composite plates

A system for designing the stacking sequence of laminated composite plates using object-oriented programming system Smalltalk-80 is presented. In this design system, the stacking sequence of a laminated composite plate is optimized to reduce the actual strain to a value less than that required by the design under an applied load with the lowest ply number subject to constraints in the stacking sequence. Two optimization approaches are provided. In the first approach, plies which most drastically reduced the actual strain of the composite plate are laminated one by one. In the second approach, based on the branch-and-bound procedure, the optimal solution to the stacking sequence problem is efficiently obtained.