Representing parts hierarchies for expert systems in engineering project management

The overall aim of the investigation presented has been to design and develop an intelligent planning system for assisting sales engineers and project planners in the preparation of a co-ordinated set of detailed information for a flight simulator, consisting of a product document, master production schedule, product tree structure together with a set of activity, material, time and cost estimates. The first stage of work on PIPPA (professional Intelligent Project Planning Assistant) involved an analysis of the planning function together with the knowledge which is employed during the preparation of a bid, providing the information required for the development of the system´s knowledge base. There then followed the development of a prototype product configuration system. The next phase was to acquire additional knowledge from senior sales engineers and project planners from the industrial collaborator. A major strand of recent work has been the development of a range of graphically-oriented interfaces for knowledge engineering, employing modelling techniques such as semantic or associative networks. Further refinements to the knowledge based project model developed for the PIPPA system have involved an analysis of the semantics of the representational system employed to produce the model, particularly with regard to the various `inclusion relations´ for representing engineering structures and systems in a symbolic manner. This has resulted in modifications to the inference engine of the knowledge based system