A small bore piping design expert system

Abstract The expert system described here is used to design small bore piping in nuclear power plants. The system addresses a domain within the automatic design paradigm. It is installed in a UNISYS mainframe environment. This paper examines the nature of the small bore piping design domain as practiced in the United States and its suitability for expert system application. The architecture, the context structure, the knowledge base, the control module and the implementation of the expert system are presented.