A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Master of Engineering, School of Engineering and Technology

Thesis (M.Eng.) - Asian Institute of Technology, 1988

Blackboard architecture is being increasingly used because the conventional architecture for knowledge based systems has been found to have drawbacks in knowledge representation facilities, separation of control knowledge and danain knowledge, etc. when applied to canplex problem danains. Blackboard systems have been built for speech recognition, ocean sw:veillance, protein structure analysis, vehicle monitoring and so on. A canparison of two of them, HEARSAY II and HASP is provided. An attempt to use blackboard architecture for solving shop floor environment problems is made here. A blackboard system for maintenance management of shop floor machinery in a steel rope industry has been designed. This system has been developed for the machines used to draw steel wires frau rods in a steel rope industry. Several design and implementation issues of this system are discussed. One unique feature of this blackboard system is the existence of blackboard objects of different types at the same level of the blackboard. The proposed architecture is generic in two aspects: its use is not limited to the maintenance management of only a class of machines; it is not limited to maintenance management problems alone and can be used to solve many management problems, in general. Possibilities of developing multiparadigm knowledge representation languages using blackboard architectures are discussed.