Problem Solving
Callisto: An Intelligent Project Management System
Sathi, Arvind, Morton, Thomas E., Roth, Steven F.
Large engineering projects, such as the engineering development of computers, involve a large number of activities and require cooperation across a number of departments. Due to technological and market uncertainties, these projects involve the management of a large number of changes. The Callisto project was born out of realization that the classical approaches to project management do not provide sufficient functionally to manage large engineering projects. Callisto was initiated as a research effort to explore project scheduling, control and configuration problems during the engineering prototype development of large computer systems and to devise intelligent project management tools that facilitate the documentation of project management expertise and its reuse from one project to another. In the first phase of the project, rule-based prototypes were used to build quick prototypes of project management expertise and the project management knowledge required to support expert project managers. In the second phase, the understanding of point solutions was used to capture the underlying models of project management in distributed project negotiations and comparative analysis. This article provides an overview of the problems, experiments, and the resulting models of project knowledge and constraint-directed negotiation.
Constructing and Maintaining Detailed Production Plans: Investigations into the Development of K-B Factory Scheduling
Smith, Stephen F., Fox, Mark S., Ow, Peng Si
To be useful in practice, a factory production schedule must reflect the influence of a large and conflicting set of requirements, objectives and preferences. Human schedulers are typically overburdened by the complexity of this task, and conventional computer-based scheduling systems consider only a small fraction of the relevent knowledge. This article describes research aimed at providing a framework in which all relevant scheduling knowledge can be given consideration during schedule generation and revision. Factory scheduling is cast as a complex constraint-directed activity, driven by a rich symbolic model of the factory environment in which various influencing factors are formalized as constraints. A variety of constraint-directed inference techniques are defined with respect to this model to provide a basis for intelligently compromising among conflicting concerns. Two knowledge-based factory scheduling systems that implement aspects of this approach are described.
An AI-Based Methodology for Factory Design
This article provides a discussion of factory design and an artificial intelligence (AI) approach to this problem. Major issues covered include knowledge acquisition and representation, design methodology, system architecture, and communication. The facilities design expert systems (FADES developed by the author is presented and described to illustrate issues in factory design.
CRSL: A Language for classificatory Problem Solving and Uncertainty Handling
In this article, we present a programming language for expressing classificatory problem solvers. CSRL (Conceptual Structures Representation Language) provides structures for representing classification trees, for navigating within those trees, and for encoding uncertainly judgments about the presence of hypotheses. We discuss the motivations, theory, and assumptions that underlie CRSL. Also, some expert systems constructed with CSRL are briefly described.
Research in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Pennsylvania
This report describes recent and continuing research in artificial intelligence and related fields being conducted at the University of Pennsylvania. Although AI research takes place primarily in the Department of Computer and Information Science ( in School of Engineering and Applied Science), many aspects of this research are preformed in collaboration with other engineering departments as well as other schools at the University, such as the College of Arts and Sciences, the School of Medicine, and Wharton School.
CRSL: A Language for classificatory Problem Solving and Uncertainty Handling
In this article, we present a programming language for expressing classificatory problem solvers. CSRL (Conceptual Structures Representation Language) provides structures for representing classification trees, for navigating within those trees, and for encoding uncertainly judgments about the presence of hypotheses. We discuss the motivations, theory, and assumptions that underlie CRSL. Also, some expert systems constructed with CSRL are briefly described.
From Guidon to Neomycin and Heracles in Twenty Short Lessons
I review the research leading from the GUIDON rule-based tutoring system, including the reconfiguration of MYCIN into NEOMYCIN and NEOMYCIN's generalization in the heuristic classification shell, HERACLES. The presentation is organized chronologically around pictures and dialogues that represent conceptual turning points and crystallize the basic ideas. My purpose is to collect the important results in one place, so they can be easily grasped. In the conclusion, I make some observations about our research methodology.
Letter to the Editor
One to organize the construction teams. One to hack the planning system. How many AI people does it take to change a lightbulb? One to get Westinghouse to sponsor the research. One to indicate about how the robot mimics human motor A. At least 55: The knowledge engineering group (6): One to define the goal state.