Flexible knowledge repositories for problem solving environments
Simón Cox, Jasmin L. Wason, Andy J. Keane · 2000
We report on a current project to develop a flexible data management system for the OPTIONS problem solving environment (PSE) which is used for design optimisation. A particular challenge for engineers is to encapsulate and exploit knowledge of past use of their PSEs to enable new designs to be developed more rapidly or at lower cost. Furthermore, any attempt to archive this knowledge must be sufficiently flexible to cope with the changing landscape caused by evolution of the PSE and its use. We discuss the design of a system which addresses these issues using Java and XML to automatically generate a database schema from flat files which contain information about the use of the PSE. This used to create a database which is populated with information from the flat files. We demonstrate some queries which can be run on the database and illustrate how the repository can be used to improve the PSE and its effectiveness.