Developer(s) | Paperback Software International |
---|---|
Initial release | 1987 |
Stable release | 2.0 / 2002 |
Operating system | MS-DOS |
Type | Expert System Development Tool |
License | Proprietary |
VP-Expert is an artificial intelligence development tool that gained popularity in the 1980s and 1990s. Published by Paperback Software, VP-Expert was designed to facilitate the creation of rule-based expert systems, primarily for applications in business and industry. [1] [2] VP-Expert was created by Brian Sawyer. [3]
VP-Expert quickly gained market share in the expert system development tool sector, particularly in academic and small to medium-sized business environments. By 1990, it had become the best-selling expert system shell, with 120,000 copies sold worldwide [4] and site licenses at DuPont, Kodak, and the Wharton School of Business.
VP-Expert emerged during a period of significant activity surrounding artificial intelligence, particularly expert systems. Expert systems aimed to capture and replicate human expertise in specific domains, enabling computers to solve problems, make decisions, and provide advice in a manner similar to human experts. This period saw the development of various expert system shells, software tools designed to facilitate the creation of expert systems without requiring extensive programming knowledge. [5]
The appeal of VP-Expert lay in its relative ease of use and affordability. It offered a user-friendly interface and a rule-based approach that was intuitive for many users, particularly those with a background in business or logic.
VP-Expert incorporated several features that supported the development and deployment of expert systems: [6]
VP-Expert found applications across various domains, [7] [8] [9] including:
Engineering and Aviation:
Business and Finance: [13]
Healthcare:
Application | Creator / Published At | Link |
---|---|---|
Database Design Advisor | IEEE | Database Design Aid |
Voltage and VAr Control in Power Transmission | IEEE | Voltage and VAr Control |
DISPO Advisor for Psychiatric Disposition | PubMed | DISPO Advisor |
Submarine Shipboard Maintenance | Wikimedia Commons | Shipboard Maintenance |
Expert Systems and the Arts | IEEE | Expert Systems and the Arts |
Nursing Diagnosis Expert System | E-HIR | Nursing Diagnosis |
Nephrolithiasis Medical Expert System | Semantic Scholar | Nephrolithiasis Diagnosis |
Water Quality Expert System | EPA | Water Quality |
Fishway Design Expert System | Springer | Fishway Design |
Soil Moisture Irrigation Control | AGRIS | Soil Moisture Control |
Airport Capacity Expert System | Transportation Research Board | Airport Capacity |
Feng Shui Knowledge for Design | Newcastle University | Feng Shui Design |
Metal Powder Selection | ResearchGate | Metal Powder Selection |
Asthma Diagnosis | GitHub | Asthma Diagnosis |
Particulate Matter Analysis | ResearchGate | Particulate Matter Analysis |
Diabetes in Dogs | GitHub | Diabetes in Dogs |
Water Quality Modeling | ScienceDirect | Water Quality Modeling |
PCB Plant Design | ScienceDirect | PCB Plant Design |
Transfer Pricing Expert System | ScienceDirect | Transfer Pricing |
Energy Demand Forecasting | ScienceDirect | Energy Forecasting |
Industrial Roof Design Optimization | ScienceDirect | Roof Design Optimization |
Flow Measurement Method Selection | ScienceDirect | Flow Measurement |
Gravity Seawalls Design | ScienceDirect | Seawalls Design |
Chromatographic Retention Prediction | ScienceDirect | Chromatographic Retention |
Emergency Alarm Analysis in Nuclear Reactors | ScienceDirect | Emergency Alarm Analysis |
River Flow Routing | ScienceDirect | River Flow Routing |
NASA Fault Isolation | ScienceDirect | NASA Fault Isolation |
Ball Bearing Design | ScienceDirect | Ball Bearing Design |
Federal Sentencing Analysis | Santa Clara Law | Federal Sentencing Analysis |
Document Delivery Expert System | Taylor & Francis | Document Delivery |
Aviation Squadron Scheduling | CORE | Squadron Scheduling |
Injection Molding Expert System | NJIT | Injection Molding |
Nuclear Safety Expert System | IAEA | Nuclear Safety |
Microcytic Anemia Diagnosis | PubMed | Microcytic Anemia Diagnosis |
Gastrointestinal Disease Diagnosis | ResearchGate | GI Disease Diagnosis |
Blood Cancer Treatment Suggestion | Iranian JHA | Blood Cancer Treatment |
Navy Stock Points Management | Naval Postgraduate School | Navy Stock Points Management |
Neural network and genetic algorithm for the design optimization of industrial roofs | ScienceDirect | Design of Industrial Roofs |
Dessert Topping Selection | ScienceDirect | Dessert Topping Selection |
Legal Decision Making | Elsevier | Legal Decision Making |
Predicting the Performance of Concrete Structures | Springer | Evaluation Performance of Concrete Structures |
Labor Progress Evaluation | NJIT | Labor Progress |
While VP-Expert offered certain advantages, it also had limitations:
In artificial intelligence (AI), an expert system is a computer system emulating the decision-making ability of a human expert. Expert systems are designed to solve complex problems by reasoning through bodies of knowledge, represented mainly as if–then rules rather than through conventional procedural programming code. Expert systems were among the first truly successful forms of AI software. They were created in the 1970s and then proliferated in the 1980s, being then widely regarded as the future of AI — before the advent of successful artificial neural networks. An expert system is divided into two subsystems: 1) a knowledge base, which represents facts and rules; and 2) an inference engine, which applies the rules to the known facts to deduce new facts, and can include explaining and debugging abilities.
Knowledge representation and reasoning is a field of artificial intelligence (AI) dedicated to representing information about the world in a form that a computer system can use to solve complex tasks, such as diagnosing a medical condition or having a natural-language dialog. Knowledge representation incorporates findings from psychology about how humans solve problems and represent knowledge, in order to design formalisms that make complex systems easier to design and build. Knowledge representation and reasoning also incorporates findings from logic to automate various kinds of reasoning.
In computer science, a knowledge base (KB) is a set of sentences, each sentence given in a knowledge representation language, with interfaces to tell new sentences and to ask questions about what is known, where either of these interfaces might use inference. It is a technology used to store complex structured data used by a computer system. The initial use of the term was in connection with expert systems, which were the first knowledge-based systems.
Knowledge engineering (KE) refers to all aspects involved in knowledge-based systems.
A decision support system (DSS) is an information system that supports business or organizational decision-making activities. DSSs serve the management, operations and planning levels of an organization and help people make decisions about problems that may be rapidly changing and not easily specified in advance—i.e., unstructured and semi-structured decision problems. Decision support systems can be either fully computerized or human-powered, or a combination of both.
Loom is a knowledge representation language developed by researchers in the artificial intelligence research group at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute. The leader of the Loom project and primary architect for Loom was Robert MacGregor. The research was primarily sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
Knowledge-based engineering (KBE) is the application of knowledge-based systems technology to the domain of manufacturing design and production. The design process is inherently a knowledge-intensive activity, so a great deal of the emphasis for KBE is on the use of knowledge-based technology to support computer-aided design (CAD) however knowledge-based techniques can be applied to the entire product lifecycle.
Paperback Software International Ltd. was a software company founded in 1983 by Adam Osborne to manufacture discount software such as word processor Paperback Writer and related spell checker Paperback Speller, spreadsheet VP-Planner, database VP-Info, and the VP-Expert artificial intelligence software. VP-Expert was developed by Brian Sawyer The company was headquartered in Berkeley, California.
Configurators, also known as choice boards, design systems, toolkits, or co-design platforms, are responsible for guiding the user through the configuration process. Different variations are represented, visualized, assessed and priced which starts a learning-by-doing process for the user. While the term “configurator” or “configuration system” is quoted rather often in literature, it is used for the most part in a technical sense, addressing a software tool. The success of such an interaction system is, however, not only defined by its technological capabilities, but also by its integration in the whole sale environment, its ability to allow for learning by doing, to provide experience and process satisfaction, and its integration into the brand concept.
Frames are an artificial intelligence data structure used to divide knowledge into substructures by representing "stereotyped situations".
An expert system for mortgages is a computer program that contains the knowledge and analytical skills of human authorities, related to mortgage banking. Loan departments are interested in expert systems for mortgages because of the growing cost of labor which makes the handling and acceptance of relatively small loans less profitable. They also see in the application of expert systems a possibility for standardized, efficient handling of mortgage loans, and appreciate that for the acceptance of mortgages there are hard and fast rules which do not always exist with other types of loans.
Spacecraft Health Inference Engine (SHINE) is a software-development tool for knowledge-based systems, created by the Artificial intelligence Group, Information Systems Technology Section at NASA/JPL. The system is in use in basic and applied AI research at JPL. SHINE was designed to operate in a real-time environment. It is written in Common LISP, but able to be utilized by non-LISP applications written in conventional programming languages such as C and C++. These non-LISP applications can be running in a distributed computing environment on remote computers or on a computer that supports multiple programming languages. SHINE provides a variety of facilities for the development of software modules for the primary functions in knowledge-based reasoning engines. The system may be used to develop artificial intelligence applications as well as specialized tools for research efforts.
VP/MS is a family of software components developed by CSC that support product development and product lifecycle management. Insurance companies use VP/MS to manage the rules, clauses, formulas and calculations associated with savings and both life and non-life insurance products. With VP/MS all calculations and queries for purposes such as quotes and administration are supported by a central repository of product definitions.
Dr. Robert L. Simpson Jr. was a computer scientist whose primary research interest was applied artificial intelligence. He served as Chief Scientist at Applied Systems Intelligence, Inc. (ASI) working with Dr. Norman D. Geddes, CEO. Dr. Simpson was responsible for the creation of the ASI core technology PreAct. ASI has since changed its name to Veloxiti Inc.
Knowledge-based configuration, also referred to as product configuration or product customization, is an activity of customising a product to meet the needs of a particular customer. The product in question may consist of mechanical parts, services, and software. Knowledge-based configuration is a major application area for artificial intelligence (AI), and it is based on modelling of the configurations in a manner that allows the utilisation of AI techniques for searching for a valid configuration to meet the needs of a particular customer.
In information technology a reasoning system is a software system that generates conclusions from available knowledge using logical techniques such as deduction and induction. Reasoning systems play an important role in the implementation of artificial intelligence and knowledge-based systems.
The fields of marketing and artificial intelligence converge in systems which assist in areas such as market forecasting, and automation of processes and decision making, along with increased efficiency of tasks which would usually be performed by humans. The science behind these systems can be explained through neural networks and expert systems, computer programs that process input and provide valuable output for marketers.
A legal expert system is a domain-specific expert system that uses artificial intelligence to emulate the decision-making abilities of a human expert in the field of law. Legal expert systems employ a rule base or knowledge base and an inference engine to accumulate, reference and produce expert knowledge on specific subjects within the legal domain.
The Knowledge Based Software Assistant (KBSA) was a research program funded by the United States Air Force. The goal of the program was to apply concepts from artificial intelligence to the problem of designing and implementing computer software. Software would be described by models in very high level languages (essentially equivalent to first order logic) and then transformation rules would transform the specification into efficient code. The air force hoped to be able to generate the software to control weapons systems and other command and control systems using this method. As software was becoming ever more critical to USAF weapons systems it was realized that improving the quality and productivity of the software development process could have significant benefits for the military, as well as for information technology in other major US industries.
Artificial intelligence is used by many different businesses and organizations. It is widely used in the financial sector, especially by accounting firms, to help detect fraud.
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