MINERVA superseeded IF/Prolog.
Please see
http://www.ifcomputer.co.jp/MINERVA
for details.
We discontinued to sell IF/Prolog Dec 31. 2003.
For current customers, we continue to provide
professional support for IF/Prolog until Dec 31, 2008.
Hewlett Packard has successfully exploited Prolog technology in a number of
business areas, including customer order clearing. The order clearing expert
system, OCEX, has been operational since April 1988 and is now in use by
nine major divisions, in almost as many countries.
OCEX checks and clears the customer orders for manufacturing departments.
Orders are generally cleared in batch mode and optionally on an individual
basis (on-line). Errors in the orders are identified and delivered in the
form of a diagnostic report from the batch processing system or displayed
immediately when on-line clearing; additions to the order are performed
automatically.
The OCEX system illustrates well, how a product specification language
benefits both the clearing of customer orders and actual product component
hierarchy, where complex products are manufactured.
Motivation
The OCEX system has been designed to transform customer orders into
production orders and to check orders with regard to correctness and
completeness, through use of an Expert System. The Expert System ensures
that only valid orders are authorised to production.
OCEX supports the manufacturing of a large extensive product range or
products complex in structure. OCEX is able to identify products that may
require restructuring, so that more common components or sets of components
are used in their manufacture. Reducing the number of sub-components
within the product range, clearly reduces manufacturing costs at a macro
level. At the same time such optimization complicates the representation of
products and increases the number of common sub--components an individual
product shipment contains.
Much of this complexity can be hidden from the order clerks by grouping
options and option sets into additional option sets to form a hierarchy. The
product hierarchy should remain simple and clean from the order clerks
viewpoint and yet require a reduced number of manufactured components
required to build the product range as a whole.
The generation and maintenance of the product hierarchy is not fully
automated; it is however, computerized. By representing product description
information as knowledge in an Expert System, product designers are able to
analyse and improve the businesses component structure.
OCEX holds knowledge about machine configurations and valid options which
may be associated with individual or groups of manufactured products.
Certain product options may also require or prohibit the inclusion of other
options. Options may be grouped into option sets and may also be specific to
certain countries. Keyboards and power supplies are classic examples of
country specific options.
Introduction of the system has also resulted in improved response times and
order correctness, within the customer sales divisions.
Implementation
The knowledge base comprises of two major parts: global knowledge, which is
common for products on a worldwide scale and local knowledge, which is
specific to one or more countries. The global knowledge is maintained
centrally and is updated at regular time intervals, by the exchange of data
files. Individual countries may also choose to exchange their specific
product descriptions with other countries.
Product description knowledge is described in a language specifically
tailored to the needs of the product range. IF/Prolog is especially well
suited to defining language grammars and syntaxes to provide a human
readable language for specifying product descriptions. Product designers
are then able to work with this language improving the product hierarchy.
This product language is then compiled into rules which are directly
executable in IF/Prolog. Applying these rules to a customer order highlights
any inconsistencies and irregularities present in the order.
The product language enables actions and tests to be specified, which are
taken when certain conditions are met in the order being processed. A
product is specified as a set of "IF - THEN" rules describing other
necessary components, options and option sets, which should or should not be
present in the order. Typically, options may also depend on the country of
origin of the order as well as some twenty or so other specification factors.
The OCEX application itself comprises largely of IF/Prolog code using C for
lower level routines and interfacing with JAM, a graphical display package.
JAM is used to designed terminal screens which produce a menu driven front
end for the order clerks. These screens or forms are used to specify product
descriptions, clear orders and maintain the knowledge information. C is
primarily used to interface JAM with IF/Prolog.
Information describing OCEX, has been kindly made available by Hewlett
Packard, Boeblingham, Germany.
Hardware : HP 9000/300,400,700 and 800 UNIX workstations with attached terminals.
Software : IF/Prolog, JAM, C.
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