E1AR0002@SMUVM1.BITNET (Leff, Southern Methodist University) (07/12/87)
Summary of Spang Robinson Report on AI, Volume 3, No. 7, July 1987
The New AI Pioneers: The Knowledge Merchants
The market for pre-built expert systems was estimated at 10 to 15 million
for 1986 with expected growth to 40 million in 1987. Many developers
found extensive customization was needed for each customer while there
were many rules that were common to everybody in the application domain.
Some info on various expert systems being sold including data on how
many sold and time/cost to develop. UNDERWRITER saves three percent
in insurance losses while Syntelligence reports a five to ten percent
improvement in loss ratios.
The numbers on the left are the development cost or times while the
numbers on the right are the purchase price.
40 man years: APEX Plan Power (125 sold) ~$34,500
20 man years: APEX Client Profiling ~$100,000
50 man years: Palladian operations planning system ~$100,000
50 man years: Palladian project management system ~$100,000
Sterling Wentworth: PLANMAN, PC based planning system
(800 copies, 7500 rules)
8 million: Syntelligence Syntel (risk assesment) ~500,000
Expert Technlogies (yellow page layout)
Cogensys: judgement processing for financial service applications
(9 systems installed.) ~ $250,000
Composition Systems: publishing systems
Eloquent Systems: Hotel Inventory Processing
Applicon: circuit design
Direct Marketing: Persorft
TRansform Logic: Computer Aided Software Engineering
(Generates COBOL generation)
General Data System, RATER and UNDERWRITER for insurance ~$250,000
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Real Time Expert Systems on PC's and micros.
Texas Instruments developed an expert system in FORTH to control water
treatment plan. McDonald Douglas is using a Fuzzy Logic based Forth running
on the NOVIX forth engine running 30,000 rules per second.
UME Corporation offers an Expert Controller
box which is a self-contained controller using expert system technology
supporting 5000 rules/second and 16,000 rules total.
It is being used in automotive hood stamping process control and for industrial
clothes driers.
ONSPEC sells a Stand Alone System for $895.00 and Superintendant intended
for running Programmable Logic Controllers. The systems support a user-friendly
operator interface for the final system, explicit handling of unknown
data and retraction of facts.
The system handles 1000 rules and 50 rules per second. (A review of
this software is in the issue.)
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Shorts:
Natural Language Incorporated has a product licensing and equity financing
agreement with MicroSoft.
DATA General will be distributing Gold Hill's products.
Teknowledge has named a former Under Secretary of Defense to
it's board of directors.
Nestor, a maker of a neural-network based system,
reported a net loss of $539,252 on revenues of $8,016.
MicroProducts is marketing PowerLisp, a virtual memory based system,
for Intel 286 and 386 based PC's.
Programs in Motion is now offering
an expert system with code generators for Pascal, C, dbase III interfacing
and form design capabilities.
Automated Reasoning is developing expert systems for ATE programming
and generates source code in BASIC, C, ATLAS, ADA or Pascal.