Summary: | 博士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 土木工程研究所 === 81 === Expert systems have been applied in engineering discipline to
solve ill-structured and symbolic problems. Most of the
reported systems are developed on commercial building tools and
function as independent consulting modules. However, features
desirable for engineering design purposes, such as the
flexibility of knowledge representation and the built-in
numerical computation capability, are poor in these tools.
Furthermore, mechanism for coupling the expert systems with
conventional CAD programs are not provided. A rule-based
expert system tool, ENGTOOL, is developed to overcome these
shortcomings. In this paper, the components of typical expert
system tools and features desirable for engineering design
applications are first discussed. Topics about ENGTOOL include
system requirements, knowledge representation, inference
strategies, explanation facilities, and user/developer
interface. A general integrated architecture between ENGTOOL
and conventional programs such as CAD systems has been
established. This consists of the following three types of
integration mechanism: (a) Calling external routions from
expert systems to perform numerical computation; (b) Calling
expert systems from conventional programs for consultation; (c)
Co-processing between conventional programs and expert systems.
Finally, steel structure and RC structure design systems are
developed to show the advantages of expressing design knowledge
as collection of rules and the suitability of ENGTOOL as a tool
for structural design expert systems.
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