---
title: "An Integration Tool for Life-Cycle Engineering"
authors:
  - "Kathryn M. Chalfan"
doi: ""
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1987/117"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1987/0117.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Tenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 1987
pages: "592-594"
track: "Knowledge Representation"
keywords:
---

# An Integration Tool for Life-Cycle Engineering

Kathryn M. Chalfan

*Proceedings of the Tenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 592-594.

## Abstract

Life-cycle engineering is the integr a ti on of the design process, which addresses primarily the system's performance , with analysis of the design 's other attributes, including reliability, maintainability, lifecycle cost, and manufacturability . The advent of symbolic approaches to design integration reveals the requirement and opportunity of using higher -level analysis to select the optimum design . This opportunity is present only when human interaction is reduced sufficiently to permit several complete design and analysis cycles to take place . We have implemented a generic integration tool that has been demonstrated to significantly shorten the design cycle, and are studying its application to life-cycle engineering. This logic-based tool regards the requested attributes as a set of uninstantiated variables and invokes external computational programs, recursively if necessary, to achieve a proof consisting of the computed variable bindings. Key Words: Software integration, engineering design, expert system.