[mod.ai] Seminars - Knowledge-Based Design & Qualitative Process Theory

pasley@SRI-KL (Christine Pasley) (06/04/86)

		CS529 - AI In Design & Manufacturing
		Instructor: Dr. J. M. Tenenbaum


Speaker:	Sanjay Mittal
From:		Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
Title:		Pride: A Knowledge-Based Framework for Design

Guest Speaker:	Kenneth Forbus
From:		Qualitative Reasoning Group
		University of Illinois
Title:		Qualitative Process Theory: Selected Topics

Date:		Wednesday, June 4, 1986
Time:		4:00 - 5:30
Place:		Terman 556


Sanjay Mittal's abstract:

This talk will describe the Pride project at Xerox.  The first part
of the talk will be about an expert system for the design of paper
transports inside copiers.  A prototype version of the system has been in
field test for a year.  It has been successfully used on real copier
projects inside Xerox - both for designing and for checking designs
produced by engineers.  From an applications point of view we have been
motivated by the following observations: knowledge is often distributed
among different experts; the process of generating designs is
unnecessarily separated from their analysis, leading to long design
cycles; and design is an evolutionary process, i.e., a process of
exploration. 

The second part of the talk will describe the framework in Pride for
representing design knowledge and using it to support the design
process.  In this framework, the process of designing an artifact is
viewed as  knowledge guided search in a multi-dimensional space of
possible designs.  The dimensions of such a space are the design
parameters of the artifact.  In this view, knowledge is used not only to
search the space but also to define the space.  Domain knowledge is
organized in terms of design plans, which are organized around goals.
Conceptually, goals decompose a problem into sub-problems and are the
units for structuring knowledge.  Design goals have design methods
associated with them, which specify alternate ways to make decisions
about the design parameters of the goal.  The third major element of a	
plan are constraints on the design parameters.  The framework provides a	
problem solver for executing these plans.  The problem solver extends
dependency-directed backtracking with an advice mechanism and a context
mechanism for simultaneously maintaining multiple designs.



Kenneth Forbus' abstract:

Much of our commonsense knowledge of the physical world appears to be
organized around a notion of physical processes.  Qualitative Process
theory provides a formal language for describing such processes,
including a qualitative representation of differential equations and
the conditions under which they apply.  This talk will briefly review
Qualitative Process theory and discuss two topics of current research:
Interpreting measurements taken across time, and a new implementation,
based on an assumption-based truth maintenance system, that provides
roughly two orders of magnitude performance improvement.