A Construction Method of Expert Systems in an Integrated Environment

This paper introduces a method of constructing expert systems in an integrated environment for automatic software design. This integrated environment may be applicable from top-level system architecture design, data flow diagram design down to flow chart and coding. The system is integrated with three CASE tools, FSD (Functional Structure Diagram), DFD (Data Flow Diagram) and structured chart PAD (Problem Analysis Diagram), and respective expert systems with automatic design capability by reusing past design. The construction way of these expert systems is based on systematic acquisition of design knowledge stemmed from a systematic design work process of well-matured developers. The design knowledge is automatically acquired from respective documents and stored in the respective knowledge bases. By reusing it, a similar software system may be designed automatically. In order to develop these expert systems in a short period, these design knowledge is expressed by the unified frame structure, functions of th expert system units are partitioned mono-functions and then standardized components. As a result, the design cost of an expert system can be reduced to standard work procedures. Another feature of this paper is to introduce the integrated environment for automatic software design. This system features an essentially zero start-up cost for automatic design resulting in substantial saving of design man-hours in the resulting in substantial saving of design man-hours in the design life cycle, and the expected increase in software productivity after enough design experiences are accumulated.