An expert shell designed to meet practical design tradeoff problems is described. Unlike conventional production system approaches, the proposed system can automatically relax firing conditions of rules during the reasoning process. Metarules are introduced to represent the design expert's knowledge on how to relax the conditions. Moreover, an automatic knowledge-base refinement mechanism is proposed. From a given set of expert designer's reasoning examples, the system generates improved metarules. It makes possible automatic knowledge-base refinements from examples at reasonable cost. The proposed expert shell has been in experimental use for designing LSI logic.
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