AN OBJECT-ORIENTED ARCHITECTURE FOR A FINITE-ELEMENT METHOD KNOWLEDGE-BASED SYSTEM

A finite element method (FEM) system is complex in nature and still fa ces bottleneck problems in its maintenance, extension, etc., and it is yet necessary to be dealt with using some new methodologies. An objec t-orientation is a promising paradigm for treating complexities. In th is paper, first an object-oriented FEM knowledge base system architect ure is proposed. Then, an object model in the FEM domain is establishe d through entity abstractions, action abstractions, category abstracti ons, agent abstractions, etc. Finally, a semantic network results from a semantic analysis of the FEM object model to represent the generati ve relationships among the FEM objects. Through an illustrative exampl e, it is shown that a control task of finite element elasto-static ana lysis can be represented by a traveling path in the semantic network.