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

A finite element method (FEM) system is complex in nature and still faces bottleneck problems in its maintenance, extension, etc., and it is yet necessary to be dealt with using some new methodologies. An object-orientation is a promising paradigm for treating complexities. In this paper, first an object-oriented FEM knowledge base system architecture is proposed. Then, an object model in the FEM domain is established through entity abstractions, action abstractions, category abstractions, agent abstractions, etc. Finally, a semantic network results from a semantic analysis of the FEM object model to represent the generative relationships among the FEM objects. Through an illustrative example, it is shown that a control task of finite element elasto-static analysis can be represented by a traveling path in the semantic network