INTEGRATING KNOWLEDGE AND DATA-PROCESSING FOR CONSTRUCTION SCHEDULING

As knowledge-based systems become more widely used in engineering comp anies, it is increasingly clear that such systems need to integrate we ll with the existing numerical processing environments, such as databa se management and project management systems. This paper describes an implemented system, CICONSA, to illustrate the applicability of anothe r approach to the integration problem via: (1) the direct integration of knowledge-bases and databases to form what we will call knowledge-e mbedded database systems, and (2) the coupling of knowledge-bases and the existing numerical computing packages to create a hybrid symbolic- numeric computing environment. The focus of this approach is on the en hancement of the widely used dBase III database management system for the embedding of knowledge in a database system, as well as for the co upling of the knowledge-embedded database system to existing programs for numerical analysis. At the end, we demonstrate its practical appli cation with a worked example.