Knowledge Acquisition

~ ~ There were two forms of knowledge acquisition that had to be done to develop SNEAKERS. The first concerned concurrent engineering. The second concerned the choice of a domain for the project and knowledge about design within that domain.

Knowledge about concurrent engineering was gathered though several sources. A survey of the literature, summarized in Chapter , provided a basic understanding of the topic. Professors Bausch and Zenger of the WPI Manufacturing Engineering department also sparked ideas and guided the search for information. After this, a meeting with Paul Posco, A. J. Overton, John Hamer, and David Meeker of the Competitive Product Development Institute at DEC offered some other suggestions.

One point of that meeting was to determine how close our analysis of the literature was to what they were saying about concurrent engineering. They confirmed the points gathered through the literature. The other point to the meeting was to attempt to determine the important features that should be included in SNEAKERS.

The choice for the domain is detailed in Chapter . Professor Zenger helped to determine the domain, as his expertise was needed to choose a domain that would meet the requirements of being intuitive and multi-disciplinary.

Once the domain was selected, Professor Zenger helped provide knowledge for the agents. He provided sample rules and acted as an expert in tower building. Knowledge about how to design a tower, and when to invoke other agents, was gained by carefully stepping through the process of designing several towers. This knowledge was captured in part through the storyboarding described in Section .