lansky@VENICE.AI.SRI.COM (Amy Lansky) (09/17/87)
VISITORS: Please arrive 5 minutes early so that you can be escorted up
from the E-building receptionist's desk. Thanks!
PRIDE: A KNOWLEDGE-BASED FRAMEWORK FOR DESIGN
Sanjay Mittal (MITTAL@XEROX.COM)
Intelligent Systems Laboratory, Xerox PARC
11:00 AM, MONDAY, September 21
SRI International, Building E, Room EJ228
In this talk I 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 over a year and will be in regular use by
year-end. 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, called Describe, 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 combines dependency-directed
backtracking ideas with an advice mechanism and a context mechanism
for simultaneously maintaining multiple partial designs. The Describe
framework has been successfully used to build a second expert system
called Cossack for configuring micro-computer systems.
If time permits, I will talk about some of the more recent ideas that
have come out of the Pride project: Knowledge compilation, Partial
choices in constraint reasoning, and constraint compilation.
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