The cognitive role of an engineer in a diagnostic task

A discussion is given on the provision of intelligent front ends to a suite of turbine vibration programs which are used by highly skilled engineers at CEGB. There is a brief account of the domain and the numerical simulations which model it. The authors then overview the expert system interface which was written to do a simple matching task and discuss some of its limitations when used by non-experts. The cognitive role of the engineers is discussed under the headings of model transformations, associative memory and perception. The proposed simulation support environment is also described. >