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No description available.

No description available.

The traditional approach to the engineering design of process plant is highly sequential with decisions made early in the design phase having a large knock on effect to downstream design processes. A lack of consideration to downstream concerns will either result in design re-work or compromise. Concurrent engineering has been proposed as a design method for resolving the problems inherent in the sequential design process by bringing the different engineering disciplines together at key decision points in the design process, thereby preventing design problems before they occur. Computational support for concurrent engineering aims to develop tools to help team members in sharing knowledge and keep track of the others' needs, constraints, decisions and assumptions [Cutkosky, et al. 93]. Such systems would enable engineering disciplines from each of the design life-cycle stages to communicate and review design strategy. As a group they would be able to explore design alternatives in search of a good solution [Talukdar, Fenves 89]. Knowledge based systems can support the engineering design process by providing advice that accounts for the global concerns. It is argued that such a system should be distributed, due to the problems in maintaining a single large knowledge base, and computational power required to operate a single system. However, wherever expertise is distributed, conflict exists that has to be resolved. The aims of this research are to identify the needs of a computational support environment to aid concurrent engineering design, and to develop a framework to enable disparate design systems to cooperate and produce designs acceptable from the global viewpoint. The 'needs' were identified from a study of the engineering design process, and a detailed analysis into the design and selection of pumping systems to provide a rich example of the problems faced in a specific design process. Cooperation is achieved through 'Negotiation', which resolves conflicts between the various objectives involved in design and is a central theme of this research. Through the provision of a framework to support negotiation the aim is to provide the basis on which individual design programs can cooperate to produce rational designs from a global perspective, thereby bringing life cycle design advice to the earlier design stages.

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This research is concerned with designing representations for analytical reasoning problems (of the sort found on the GRE and LSAT). These problems test the ability to draw logical conclusions. A computer program was developed that takes as input a straightforward predicate calculus translation of a problem, requests additional information if necessary, decides what to represent and how, designs representations capturing the constraints of the problem, and creates and executes a LISP program that uses those representations to produce a solution. Even though these problems are typically difficult for theorem provers to solve, the LISP program that uses the designed representations is very efficient.

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This work examines one of the major stumbling blocks of knowledge based systems development, namely knowledge elicitation. The challenge is a fundamental one of eliciting knowledge from domain experts including tacit knowledge. This thesis argues that, in the past, knowledge elicitation has been limited since elicitation has been performed from one or a limited number of aspects. A method is needed to assist in providing a pluralistic approach to knowledge elicitation that will aid multi-aspectual viewpoints of the domain knowledge to be elicited. MAKE (Multi-Aspectual Knowledge Elicitation) is such a pluralistic method. Using the work of Herman Dooyeweerd (1955) MAKE is developed from a sound philosophical basis. Two levels of knowledge are elicited using MAKE. The method starts by building a top-level knowledge map that covers all of the knowledge aspects and provides an overview of the domain. Such an overview determines the complexity of the domain allowing a knowledge based systems developer to see the effects of taking a minimalist approach to the development; that is the top-level map may be used to help define the scope of a system. The second level involves detailed knowledge elicitation. Using a process of abstraction, the concepts defined in each aspect are refined to a sufficiently detailed level to enable a system to be built. The resulting knowledge forms an ontological view of the domain knowledge. The empirical work adopting a case study approach has demonstrated that: MAKE can be used by people who are not necessarily versed in artificial intelligence techniques or in the philosophy of Dooyeweerd. MAKE has shown itself to be adaptable across a very varied set of domains MAKE is adaptable and useful for eliciting tacit knowledge. It is argued that MAKE indicates a change of direction from methods that are currently in use.

No description available.

No description available.