DOMAIN-INDEPENDENT DESIGN SYSTEM Environment/or rapid development of configuration-design systems

This paper describes the Domain-Independent Design System (DIDS). DIDS provides a set of tools capable of rapidly constructing configuration-design systems from a library of reusable software elements, called mechanisms. The power of DIDS comes from its model of configuration design that enables reusable mechanism to be identified. DIDS contains four components. The first component, the Problem-Solving-Method (PSM) Editor builds PSMs by combining mechanisms. The Code Generator, DIDS's second component, generates a problem solver from the PSM description created in the editor. The third component, the Knowledge-Acquisition Tool Generator builds a knowledge acquisition (KA) tool that interviews the domain expert to gather the knowledge required by the DIDS-generated problem solver. The final component, the Debugging Tool, monitors the execution of the problem solver to uncover errors made during KA, and to improve the performance of the design tool. This paper presents a scenario demonstrating how DIDS will be used to build configuration systems.

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