OFFICE-PLAN: Tackling the Synthesis-Frontier

Analytic problems like diagnosis or classification have been intensively studied and their abstract structure is well known. For synthetic tasks like design, configuration or assembly such models are still missing. They would help us to understand the nature of the problem, the types of knowledge involved, to guide the knowledge acquisition process and to serve as a specification for the implementation. Based on concrete experiences from modelling and building an office planning system we give a first, tentative description of a conceptual model for assembly tasks.