Date of Graduation

2001

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Type

MS

Committee Chair

Dianne McMullin

Abstract

Object-Orientation is a powerful approach to managing complexity, which has received widespread attention in the past few years. Object-Oriented Design is based on a small number of basic concepts: object, classes, operations and relationships. Some important relationships are inheritance, message passing, and encapsulation. Different methods and notations have been proposed within this paradigm, and a Unified Modeling Language has been developed based on several of these methods. Most rule-based expert systems are not flexible enough to handle problems that mix logical deductions, rule-based inferences, and procedure execution, but mixed problems are common in modern society. Management decisions, for example, are often based on both rules and operations-research techniques. These problems cannot be solved by either a conventional expert systems or common operation-research techniques alone. Their solution demands a new system architecture that effectively combines rules and procedures. The emergence of the expert systems in operational settings has been the result of intensive research over the past decades. However, while considerable progress has been made in developing the conceptual basis for expert systems, the means to evaluate them lag for behind. Accidents can happen to workers using a tool or piece of technology due to lack of training, a fault in machine or tool, somebody else's fault, etc. The TEXPERT project aims to reduce the misuses and abuses of human resources. The major research objective of the TEXPERT project is to develop an expert system that will evaluate product design for safety and health This paper tries to bridge the gap between abstract conceptual models of Object-Oriented Design and abstract conceptual models proposed for Expert Systems with converting a part of the TEXPERT which is rule-based into Object-Oriented structure.

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