The purpose of this paper is to evaluate and compare three of the most powerful expert system tools available: KEE from Intellicorp, Knowledge Craft from The Carnegie Group Inc., and ART from Inference Corporation.These three tools are industrial development environments which are fully supported and well beyond research prototypes. They were implemented on Lisp machines initially, but will soon be available on conventional computers. The three systems are very flexible and offer many ways of representing knowledge.The first part of the paper is a technical overview of each tool. The second part presents their common features. The third part discusses the advantages and drawbacks of each, according to types of application.This work has been partially sponsored by the Commission of the European communities within the Esprit Project 932 entitled ‘Knowledged-based Real-Time supervision in Computer Integrated Manufacturing’. We are grateful to Didier Gaget-Soufflot (Graphael, France) and Bernard Raust (CGE/TITN) for their participation in the evaluation of KEE and ART respectivily.
In the computer integrated manufacturing field, the problem of integrating production management decisions is often viewed as nothing but a problem of data sharing between activities. To be truly 'computer integrated' a production management system must be able to coordinate these decisions and to take in charge the conflicts arising between the decisionmaking systems of a production management system. In this paper, we propose an architecture in which the decision coordinalion and decision synchronization task (also called supervision task) is viewed as a software layer (called a localcontroller) over each decision-making system. We derive the knowledge needed by each local-controller, first to detect confliers between the decision·rnaking systems or with the state of the production system, second the knowledge needed to solve these conflicts. Each local-controller is placed into two relation networks through which its cooperative behaviour can be predclined. Moreover. we defined a data structure allowing description of the concessions the decision-making systems are ready to make in order to help conflict solving. Each localcontroller is a knowledge-based reactive system, using a blackboard mechanism and able to dialogue with other local-controllers. General behaviour models for any localcont roller are defmed, particularly cooperative behaviour of local-controllers with each other. A local-controller shell has been developed from which all local-controllers are instantiated.
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