A knowledge-based approach to the structural analysis of large spacestructures

Analysis is one of the key issues in realizing large space structures. In spite of the fact that a huge amount of accumulation has been done in the field of structural analysis, there is still a need to include newly developed methodologies into analysis codes for production use. This paper introduces an attempt which implements a knowledge-based approach to structural analysis based on the idea that numerical analysis programming can be thought of as a particular type of engineering design. A system is proposed which first accepts the user's description of a problem, then generates a program, along with input data, and finally to give a result to the user. In order to test the possibility of this approach, a problem solving model called Organizational Model is introduced and is implemented based on the object-oriented program development.