gillam@aero.ARPA (April Gillam) (11/18/87)
We are developing a quasi expert system to make a conceptual design of a spacecraft. This involves a lot of data and rules at the spacecraft mission level and at the subsystem(acs,power,comm,etc.) level. We will also be keeping track of 'historical' info on spacecraft that have already been launched. The system is being written in Quintus Prolog, which is relatively new to me. Is there some way to segment the data bases so that there are fewer facts for the 'matcher' to plough through till it finds the appropriate data? I have been considering separating the data into different files and only loading in what is needed to do the inferencing & calculations, & then deleting it -- if I can figure out when to do that & hope the overhead is less than the search time when all that info is in the database at once. I've implemented Sterling & Shapiro's symbolic equation solver with some enhancements, but it is fairly slow on the substitution part. (By the way, I recommend The Art of Prolog. It's been very useful.) I'm assuming that is because there's so much data associated with each spacecraft, and for simplicities sake I'm using the same format for most of the data. This allows many routines to be used in many different situations, but there is all that data! Thanks for any help on this. April Gillam gillam@aerospace.ARPA Aerospace Corp.