A Knowledge-Representation Language for Engineering Design Codes

Abstract

Several years' experience in building substantial prototype expert systems (involving several thousand lines of Prolog), mostly for engineering design codes using graphics, has led to the conclusion that Prolog is a very awkward language for representing several types of knowledge that are common in design codes. These include rules that are naturally written as mathematical expressions, operations that require iteration over the members of a list, handling of complex tables and arrays, and graphical user interfaces.

An expert-system shell is now being designed to overcome these problems. The shell will use a declarative language based on Prolog, but with extensions to handle the above problems and to facilitate explanation of the reasoning process. It will be prototyped in Prolog, and then implemented in C to achieve greater efficiency.

The knowledge-representation problems that have inspired the development of this shell are described, and preliminary proposals for the design of features to overcome them are presented.

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