Virginia E. Barker
Abstract
Members of Digital Equipment Corporation's team of expert system experts reflect and recount a decade's worth of lessons learned in designing, and building a core of configuration systems
- 1 Bachant, J. RIME: Preliminary work loward a knowledge-acquisition tool. In Automating Knowledge Acquisition for Expert Systems, S. Marcus, Ed. Kluwer Academic, 1988.Google Scholar
Cross Ref
- 2 Bachant, J., and McDermott, J. R1 revisited: Four years in the trenches. AI Mag. 5, 3 (1984).Google Scholar
- 3 Feigenbaum, E., McCorduck, P., and Nii, H.P. The Rise of the Expert Company. Times Books, New York, 1988. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 4 Kiskiel, M., Lynch, F., Marshall, C., and O'Connor, D. AI in manufacturing at Digital. AI Mag. 7, 5 (1986). Google ScholarDigital Library
- 5 Laird, J., and Newell, A. A universal weak method. Tech. Rep. Carnegie-Mellon Univ., Dept. of Computer Science, 1983.Google Scholar
- 6 Leonard-Barton, D. Implementation as mutual adaptation of technology and organization. Res. Policy 17, 5 (Oct. 1988), 1-17.Google ScholarCross Ref
- 7 Leonard-Barton, D. The case for integrative innovation: An expert system at Digital. Sloan Manage. Rev. 29, 1 {Fall 1987).Google Scholar
- 8 Leonard-Barton, D., and Sviokla, J.J. Putting expert systems to work. Harvard Bus. Reo. 66, 2 (Mar.-Apr. 1988). Google ScholarDigital Library
- 9 McDermott, J. XSEL: A computer salesperson's assistant. In Machine Intelligence, J. Hayes and D. Michie, Eds. John Wiley and Sons, 1982.Google Scholar
- 10 McDermott, J. RI: The formative years. AI Mag. 2, 2 (1981).Google Scholar
- 11 McDermott, J. RI: A rule-based configurer of computer systems. Artif. Intell. 19, 1 (1982).Google ScholarDigital Library
- 12 Soloway, E., Bachant, J., and Jensen, K. Assessing the maintainability of XCON-in-RIME: Coping with the problems of a very large rulebase. In Proceedings of AA,41-87, July, 1987.Google Scholar
- 13 van de Brug, A., Bachant, J., and McDermott, J. Taming of R1. IEEE Expert (Summer 1986).Google ScholarCross Ref
Index Terms
- Expert systems for configuration at Digital: XCON and beyond
Recommendations
Expert Systems and Optimization
A problem-solving approach involving the integration of expert systems and optimization techniques is presented. A class of expert systems called tandem expert systems is introduced. Three variants of the tandem expert system, the data-reducing, model-...
Reviews
Jaak Tepandi
The proponents of artificial intelligence often refer to configuration systems at Digital (R1, XCON, XSEL, and others) as the most successful applications of knowledge-based methods. While this is in some sense true—this paper estimates the overall net income due to these systems to be in excess of $40 million per year—it is only a part of the story. In the first part of this paper, Barker and O'Connor take a holistic approach, discussing the following key factors in developing successful expert system applications: strategic/business, technical, and human resources/organizational. The discussion reads well and is well structured, although the layout of headings and subheadings seems insufficient to reflect this structure adequately. The accompanying material by Bachant and Soloway focuses on RIME, a software engineering methodology for expert systems developed at Digital's Configuration Systems Development Group. It discusses new control techniques for XCON (algorithmic control and explicitly choosing among alternatives) as well as guidelines for organizing the rule base. It will be interesting to see whether the implementation of this methodology results in something close to a hybrid of the rule- and object-oriented approaches. As a whole, familiarity with the ideas expressed in this paper is desirable for anybody trying to develop operational, integrated, successful expert system applications.
Access critical reviews of Computing literature here
Become a reviewer for Computing Reviews.
Comments