A task-oriented architecture for process control applications

The author outlines the motivation behind ESPRIT project p820: Design and Experimentation of a KBS Development Toolkit for Real-Time Process Control Applications. He is developing a novel architecture capable of representing different sources of knowledge, an empirical model that uses observed knowledge of the system´s behaviour and an ontological model based on the application of general physical laws to obtain an explicit qualitative model of the process. This partitioning of process knowledge provides a clear separation between the informal experienced based approaches and established formal methods based on the application of appropriate theories. In general, problem solving in complex domains requires a sophisticated and subtle blending of these two sources. The toolkit architecture allows for the blending of these approaches at the task level thereby making explicit the distinction and therefore allowing more general task level problem solvers to be constructed, rather than ad hoc combinations