Application of AI and model building techniques to software engineering

The authors have been working on the use of AI techniques to support modelling and simulation of dynamic systems and have developed a demonstration environment KEMS (Knowledge-based Environment for Modelling and Simulation) which is based on the idea of re-usable components. Once the structure of the model is established, KEMS generates automatically the simulation code. The fundamental ideas in KEMS arise from consideration of methodologies for applying AI to the construction of models and hence they have also considered how the techniques can be applied to model-based software engineering methodologies for specification and design of software. They discuss the structure of KEMS, knowledge acquisition and the application to software specification and construction using MASCOT