An intelligent graphical user interface for a design environment

The development of an intelligent graphical user interface has been considered as one of the intermediate objectives for the provision of an environment to assist a team of cooperating designers during the design of chemical plants. Within the design environment, a knowledge representation has been proposed to maintain and use a history of the design process. It consists of five types of closely interrelated objects: projects, metaschema, schema, units, and items of equipment. The interface was designed to make those types of objects and their relations easily accessible for examination and manipulation. It is composed of three subsystems: the Top Window that acts as a system manager; the Scheme Hierarchy that displays the structure of the design history; and the Flowsheet Tool that provides a graphical representation of alternative designs. Objects shown by the interface are active in the sense that they are associated to a set of behaviours as responses to mouse events (e.g. moving, displaying a menu, generating a browsing window). The interface is fully integrated with the underlying knowledge representation system, and allows flexible navigation through the various parts of the design structure. It was implemented using the object-oriented paradigm, and its open architecture eases the access and integration to other applications.