Developing knowledge sources to identify and evaluate tradeoffs among alternate designs in a cooperative engineering framework

Current computer aided engineering tools support only a single specialized area of the design cycle and do not allow for comparisons of multiple designs. The DICE project at MIT (1987-1995) sought to address these limitations by developing tools that support a cooperative design cycle involving negotiation by various experts as the design evolves. CONGEN, a system developed under DICE, provides a blackboard-like context mechanism for negotiation and a knowledge base of design strategies. We propose a means of extending the knowledge base with a set of design evaluation Knowledge sources to assist in comparing alternate designs and identifying the tradeoffs among them.