OPSYN: A cad based expert system for optimum structural synthesis

This paper presents an overview of an expert system. OPSYN, for optimum structural synthesis, with particular emphasis on the significance of the development environment for such systems. The knowledge base for this system includes rules for facilitating finite element modeling, optimum design modeling, and selection of optimization strategies and parameters. The environment for this development is an inference engine with both forward and backward reasoning capabilities, a detailed explanation facility, and an automated knowledge acquisition system with a knowledge base editor facility. The use of a computer-aided design (CAD) interface with its significant data structure and graphics capabilities in the knowledge acquisition and knowledge representation process is demonstrated with this expert system.