Engineers Don't Search

Abstract. This paper is on the automation of knowledge-intensive tasks in engineering domains; here, the term “task” relates to analysis and synthesis tasks, such as diagnosis and design problems. In the field of Artificial Intelligence there is a long tradition in automated problem solving of knowledge-intensive tasks, and, especially in the early stages, the search paradigm dictated many approaches. Later, in the modern period, the hopelessness in view of intractable search spaces along with a better problem understanding led to the development of more adequate problem solving techniques. However, search still constitutes an indispensable part in computer-based diagnosis and design problem solving—albeit human problem solvers often gets by without: “Engineers don´t search” is my hardly ever exaggerated observation from various relevant projects, and I tried to learn lessons from this observation. This paper presents two case studies.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: BIRTHDAY
• Authors: Benno Stein
• Keywords: Applied Computing, BIRTHDAY 2004, Design Problem, Knowledge-intensive Tasks, Problem Solving