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A KBES for integrated engineering

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Abstract

The expert process of engineering involves application of knowledge fundamental to the engineering process at one end, and of compiled knowledge in the form of heuristics gained through many years of experience at the other. Developments in Artificial Intelligence have made the process of computer aided engineering richer by enabling the simulation of this human process of engineering, which until now has been difficult to capture. Knowledge Based Expert Systems (KBES) in engineering developed so far have addressed only narrow domains of the entire process of engineering. This paper discusses a KBES shell (IES) that integrates various AI technologies, which makes it possible to implement new problem-solving strategies required for efficient handling of the entire engineering process. Issues in the integrated process of engineering are discussed first, in order to evolve a specification for the shell. The blackboard architecture is shown to be the ideal backbone for such a shell. The details of inference techniques, the knowledge based backtracking mechanism and the DBMS used in the IES are presented. The application of the IES is demonstrated using the domain of integrated engineering of steel industrial structures as an example. This application encompasses the engineering activities of conceptual design, detailed design, documentation and construction planning.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Structural Engineering Laboratory, Department of Civil Engineering, IIT, Madras, India

    T. S. Sakthivel (Research Scholar) & V. Kalyanaraman

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  1. T. S. Sakthivel
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  2. V. Kalyanaraman
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Sakthivel, T.S., Kalyanaraman, V. A KBES for integrated engineering. Engineering with Computers 9, 1–16 (1993). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01198249

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