Critique: Automated Reuse of Design Plans in BOGART
Mostow, Barley, Weinrich
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VEXED allows backtracking and saves only the steps of a plan that
were not retracted. This means that there is no capture of the mistakes
made during the design process. BOGART allows steps to be saved even
if they are retracted. The design plan that contains the later retracted
steps appears just as any other plan saved in the system. While I think
it is good that BOGART adds this saving functionality, it is foolish
to not capture the that steps in the plan might not be correct. There
is much useful information in knowing where plans can make mistakes and
BOGART does not take advantage of this.
It wasn't clear at first, but it seems BOGART uses the idea of
correspondence to decide whether a branch of the design plan should be
replayed or not.
BOGART seems to be primarily a Case-Based Reasoning system without the
reasoning. It stores cases, design plans as a tree of rules. The further
down the tree, the less abstract the rule are. It seems many of the
advantages this system could provide are left to the user.
It does seems much better than making the user choose each rule that gets
applied as in the pre-BOGART VEXED. The main flaw seems to be that the more
design plans one has in the system, the more useful the system becomes.
The more design plans there are, the more work it is for the user to sort
through them to pick an appropriate one. This ultimately limits the system
(as described here) from ever being truly useful.
Most of the circuit diagrams didn't seem to add anything to the article
and could have been excluded. The same goes for the benchmarking section.
Measuring user effort seems like a whole separate topic for research.
While it was slightly interesting to see some measure of how BOGART
improved upon VEXED, far too much detail was given considering the flaws
of the chosen measure.
Big points for the article mentioning CRITTER... Ooo, CRITTER.
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Jack Mostow & Michael Barley & Timothy Weinrich,
Automated Reuse of Design Plans in BOGART.
In: Artificial Intelligence in Engineering Design, Vol. 2,
(Eds) C. Tong & D. Sriram, Academic Press, 1992, pp. 57-103.
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