CBR adaptation for chemical formulation

Solution adaptation of previously solved cases to fit new situations is one of the basic tasks of the Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) approach for problem solving. The central issue of the paper is to present a formal computational model for the chemical formulation as innovative adaptation of previously developed products for new scenario and/or constraints in product design process. This general model (called Abstract Compound Machine -ACM) allows knowledge about chemical formulation to be explicitly represented, computed, integrated and performed in a CBR architecture. The specic domain that is presented as an example for the implementation of the ACM model regards the creation of rubber compounds. Its generality allows it to be adopted in cases of chemical formulation where basic ingredients are expressed in discrete quantities.