Database support for knowledge-based engineering environments

The authors discuss Marvel, a knowledge-based engineering environment that can be instantiated with the entities and tools for a specific engineering project, together with rules regulating (technical) conduct of the project. The resulting environment maintains database representations of entities and carries out menial chores through controlled automation. The authors concentrate on the details of MSL (Marvel Strategy Language) and tool envelopes, including the algorithms used in the various parts of the Marvel system. These algorithms are different from those used for other expert systems because of Marvel´s requirement for large-scale entities, the ability to load and unload strategies with different behavior and views of the database structure, and the overhead of tool processing effectively prohibiting ´undo´ during backtracking.<>