To a wide range of industrial application domains, such as camera design, copying machines design, architectural design and plant elements design, DSP and its programming environment have been applied for over 5 years.

In the Proceedings of the Ninth Industrial and Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems (IEA/AIE) held on June 4-7 in Japan, Mr. Masanobu Umeda et al of Kyushuu Institute of Technology presented a paper on DSP, a programming language specific for design calculation problems.

In the product development area, ``design work has become difficult and complicated because of varieties of user and social requirements''. Therefore, ``improvement of the intellectual productivity of experts such as product designers is essential'' and ``knowledge-based systems such as intelligent CAD systems are heavily expected''. But the description of the knowledge should be easy so that the product designers can develop and maintain the system without the help from computer programmers. ``DSP is intended for designers themselves to describe and maintain their design knowledge.''

DSP is ``a functional programming language based on attribute grammars with capability of describing generate and test algorithms. The concepts of data flow and `generate and test' in DSP are suitable for the formal description of design knowledge where trial and error are involved.''

DSP and its programming environment have been applied for over 5 years to a wide range of industrial application domains, such as camera design, copying machines design, architectural design and plant elements design.

DSP is implemented in IF/Prolog. (The IF/Prolog Newsbrief 96-08)