Artificial intelligence—morphological approach as a new technological forecasting technique

SUMMARY Technological forecasting is located in technological space for a certain engineering domain and is the first step in the research and development of a new technology. There are many techniques already developed for technological forecasting like extrapolation of trends, heuristics forecasting by expert e.g. Delphi method, etc. The morphological method (MM) is used to describe a technique for identifying, indexing, counting and parametrizing the collection of all possible devices to achieve a specified functional capability. This is not a forecasting per se, but it is a useful organizing tool, a source of insights, and a starting point for further analysis by other methods, Milacic (1976). In the paper we expand the capabilities of MM using artificial intelligence (Al) principles. The AI production system has a global data base, a set of production rules and a control system. Special attention is paid to control strategy-developing searching techniques in order to distinguish the explicit local kn...