| 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.
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