Automated underground residential distribution design. I. Conceptual design

The design of the electrical supply system for new residential developments (electrical plat design) is considered. As an ill-structured and open-ended problem, the plat design is difficult to automate with conventional approaches. An additional complexity is imposed by the need to process spatial data such as circuits' maps, records, and construction plans. The intelligent decision support system for automated electrical plat design (IDSS for AEPD), an engineering tool aimed at automating plat design is presented. The IDSS for AEPD combines the functionality of a geographically referenced database with the sophistication of artificial intelligence (AI) to deal with the complexity inherent in this type of problem. An architecture called the Blackboard Based IDSS accommodates diverse software environments, data models, and problem-solving paradigms. >