DEXT - AN INTEGRATED KNOWLEDGE-ENGINEERING ENVIRONMENT FOR CONTROL-ENGINEERING APPLICATIONS

The paper presents DEXT, an integrated knowledge-engineering tool for control-engineering applications. First, the domain of control engineering has been analysed so that a few of the key requirements to be satisfied by the tool may be identified. A large number of software packages developed over the years for dealing with different aspects of control engineering constitute the primary knowledge base of an expert system for such applications. Unfortunately, these packages have been developed in different languages, and they differ in their performance with regard to computational efficiency and numerical stability. Hence, transparent access to a bank of such packages must be allowed, and such accesses must be independent of the language in which the packages are written. Apart from providing such an interface, the proposed tool must also support a variety of data types. A structured organization of the design information is also required, as the expert system may refer to such facts at different levels of abstraction. The structure of the rules and the facts is described in detail. The salient features of DEXT include the feature of transparent interfacing with the external packages, and enhancement of inferencing efficiency through the techniques of rule partitioning and intelligent backtracking.