Domain knowledge and the design process

Abstract

During the past 10 or 12 years, Artificial Intelligence researchers have explored techniques for bringing large amounts of domain knowledge to bear in solving ill-structured problems. Several programs that make use of these knowledgebased techniques are currently being developed to assist in various design tasks. This paper introduces one technique - rule-based programming - and illustrates its use with two programs, R1 and XSEL, which are used by Digital Equipment Corporation in the design of computer system configurations.1