Looking for analogies in structural safety management through connectionist associative memories

This paper describes the first successful achievements of an experimental application of connectionist hashed associative memories for realising analogical reasoning. The application field is the management of structural safety, where analogical reasoning is used to retrieve, given the qualitative description of the state of a structure, the closest-matching cases stored in a case base, which can help safety managers to interpret the current situation. This work extends the use of Greene's associative memories by proposing a complex data structure and a compositional algorithm able to access the case base through structured keywords.