An architecture for high performance engineering information systems

Commercially available database systems do not meet the information and processing needs of design and manufacturing environments. A new generation of systems-engineering information systems-must be built to meet these needs. The architectural and computational aspects of such systems are addressed, and solutions are proposed. The authors argue that a mainframe-workstation architecture is needed to provide distributed functionality while ensuring high availability and low communication overhead, that explicit control of metaknowledge is needed to support extendibility and evolution, that large rule bases are needed to make the knowledge of the systems active, and that incremental computation models are needed to achieve the required performance of such engineering information systems.>