Knowledge engineering in design

摘要

The authors present, in a unifying framework, the principles of the IIICAD system, a generic design apprentice currently under development at CWI. IIICAD incorporates three kinds of design knowledge. First, it has general knowledge about the stepwise nature of design based on a set-theoretic design theory. Second, it has domain-dependent knowledge belonging to the specific design areas where it may actually be used. Finally, it maintains knowledge about the previously designed objects; this is somewhat similar to software reuse. Furthermore, IIICAD uses AI techniques in the following areas: formalization of design processes, extensional versus intentional descriptions, modal and other non-standard logics as knowledge representation tools; commonsense reasoning about the physical world (naive physics), coupling symbolic and numerical computation; integration of object-oriented and logic programming paradigms, and development of a common base language for design.