ENHANCING THE BLACKBOARD CONCEPT TO PRODUCE A FLEXIBLE, EXTENSIBLE KNOWLEDGE-BASED DESIGN TOOL

MINDS (Measurement INterface Design System) is an interactive tool whi ch supports the design of multisensor measurement systems and assists in the creation of a hardware and software structure which represents the knowledge required to build the system. It uses intelligent subsys tems to provide specific information gathered from expert and detailed knowledge sources to support the developing design. MINDS-3, the curr ent version of MINDS, is implemented as an enhanced blackboard archite cture using Prolog in a Macintosh environment. Rather than describing the operation of the system, the paper takes a retrospective and more abstract view of a system implementation which has resulted in a flexi ble and dynamic architecture. It describes the requirements of MINDS-3 , and how these led to an architecture which reflects the consideratio n given to the role and composition of the intelligent subsystems, the dynamic invocation and termination of the subsystems, the role of the user, and the positioning of the user interface in an interactive sys tem. The resulting tailored blackboard architecture offers flexibility as its major strength, while making few modifications to the original blackboard concept. Nevertheless, difficulties in implementing the bl ackboard architecture for a system of this type (a single-tasking syst em) were experienced. The paper discusses the successes and difficulti es of the MINDS-3 system implementation.