Harry Wu, Hon Wai Chun, Alejandro Mimo
This paper describes an integrated programming environment which is specially tailored to the development of knowledge-based system configurators. It is designed with three major objectives: to provide an integrated representational framework for the various knowledge sources relevant to the configuration task, to assist a knowledge engineer in the development and administration of the knowledge base, and to aid a knowledge engineer in the actual construction of a system configurator. Particular attention is placed on the engineering aspects of the system construction process. Specifically, we describe how knowledge acquisition is eased through the use of a configuration language which is specially designed to represent the various knowledge sources for configuration, how knowledge encoding and modification may be aided by the knowledge engineer assistant module, and how the development of user interface may be aided by a generic user interface generator. A prototype of the special purpose environment is implemented on a XEROX 1108 workstation and is being used to develop configuration expert systems at Honeywell.