ABSTRACT
An increasing important idea in engineering computing is that of applied Artificial Intelligence (Al) - Expert and Decision Support Systems (ES/DSS). A pioneering yet clearly synergistic concept is the fusing of the two concepts, the ES and the traditional engineering model into an advanced form of an ‘integrated design environment’.
One Al application area that both improves upon the concept of the stand alone ES/DSS and aids integration is that of the ‘intelligent system’ (IS)- a combination of hypermedia, object orientation, expert systems and database technologies.
Such IS’s are now beginning to be applied as the intelligent core to Executive Information Systems (EIS), and Management Support System (MSS) but they can offer improvements in the software engineering approaches to integrated design environments. Independently, an IS can improve efficiency and provide ‘intelligent assistance’, and a level of integration not previously available to engineers.
The construction of such a core IS, ESWHAM (Expert System for Water quality and Hydraulic Analysis Modelling) is described, with proposals of how this can be expanded into a full integrated and intelligent design environment for water quality and hydraulic modelling (using existing commercial or in-house models.)
The prototype IS operates in MS-Windows (using conventional DOS based models) on a 386 PC.
