COMIX (configuration of mixing machines) is a system that assists members of the EKATO Sales Department in designing a mixing machine that fulfills the requirements of a customer. It is used to help the engineer design the requested machine and prepare an offer that's to be submitted to the customer. During the process of routine design, some design decisions have to be made with uncertainty. The success of the system can be measured by the increase in the quantity and the quality of the submitted offers.

Interactive simulation environments constitute one of today's promising emerging technologies, with applications in areas such as education, manufacturing, entertainment, and training. These environments are also rich domains for building and investigating intelligent automated agents, with requirements for the integration of a variety of agent capabilities but without the costs and demands of low-level perceptual processing or robotic control. Our current target is intelligent automated pilots for battlefield-simulation environments. This article provides an overview of this domain and project by analyzing the challenges that automated pilots face in battlefield simulations, describing how TacAir-Soar is successfully able to address many of them -- TacAir-Soar pilots have already successfully participated in constrained air-combat simulations against expert human pilots -- and discussing the issues involved in resolving the remaining research challenges.

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence held its 1994 Fall Symposium Series on November 4-6 at the Monteleone Hotel in New Orleans, Louisiana. This article contains summaries of the five symposia that were conducted: (1) Control of the Physical World by Intelligent Agents, (2) Improving Instruction of Introductory AI, (3) Knowledge Representation for Natural Language Processing in Implemented Systems, (4) Planning and Learning: On to Real Applications, and (5) Relevance.

CLAVIER is a case-based reasoning (CBR) system that assists in determining efficient loads of composite material parts to be cured in an autoclave. CLAVIER's central purpose is to find the most appropriate groupings and configurations of parts (or loads) to maximize autoclave throughput yet ensure that parts are properly cured. CLAVIER uses CBR to match a list of parts that need to be cured against a library of previously successful loads and suggest the most appropriate next load. As one of the first fielded CBR systems, CLAVIER demonstrates that CBR is a practical technology that can be used successfully in domains where more traditional approaches are difficult to apply.

The vertical launch system (vls) tech-assist expert system is being used by the in-service engineering agent as a force multiplier to maintain the readiness, with fewer resources, of a growing population of vlss in the U.S. Navy fleet. This article describes the collaborative development of this knowledge-based system for diagnosis; its main features, including case-based and model-based reasoning; and the lessons we learned from the process.

Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp -- A Review

The Workshop on Comparative Analysis of AI Planning Systems, held during the 1994 national AI conference, was lively and interesting. Both the theoretical and practical sides of the AI planning community were represented. Several papers contributed to the theoretical analysis of planning algorithms, and others showed the first steps toward convergence between such theoretical work and practical work on the system engineering aspects of working planners.

The 1993 International Logic Programming Symposium was held in Vancouver, British Columbia, on 26-29 October. It presented the state of the art in logic programming, emphasizing the deliberate interaction with other fields, in particular, humanistic fields. Topics covered at the symposium included algorithmic analysis, programming methodologies, semantic analysis, deductive databases, and programming language design.

Efficient indexing schemes have influenced the acceptance of production systems in the industrial world. However, in embedded-control systems, production systems have not been applied intensively because of their nondeterministic run-time behavior. Thus, nonpredictability of response times is a major obstacle to the widespread use of expert systems in the real-time domain. The RETE and TREAT algorithms and their offspring play a major role in the implementation of efficient pattern-matching systems.