Interface to a design knowledge base in a CIM environment that understands user design intentions

Abstract

A new dialogue-based approach towards conceptual interactive design within a CIM environment is presented. The main objective is the development of a highly interactive interface to a mechanical design knowledge base, where the interactive system attempts to understand the intentions that underlie the designer's queries. The need for such a system stems from the observation that effective interaction between the designer and the knowledge-based system is possible only when the system has a fairly accurate notion of what the user intends to know or do. The designer's perceived beliefs and goals have to be interpreted in terms of the mechanical engineering design knowledge that resides in the knowledge base. This automatically implies that:(i) there is a need to capture the structural, functional and behavioural relationships that form the core of the knowledge domain; and (ii) there is a need for tracking the user's intentions and goals during the interaction. The author's approach is based on a model that uses an explicit causal network of behavioural states to perform commonsense reasoning about the mechanical engineering design domain. This is coupled with an enhanced language understander with a mechanism for contextual understanding. To comprehend the implied design intentions from the designer's input, both language dependent concepts and relevant design (domain) dependent knowledge are utilized in the reasoning strategy. An interactive environment based on this approach has been developed in Smalltalk-80. This approach is illustrated with an example dealing with the domain of automotive caburettor design.