Deploying expert systems in Ada

S. Daniel Lee, Bradley P. Allen

Abstract: As the Department of Defense Ada mandate begins to be enforced actively, interest in deploying expert systems in Ada has increased. This paper introduces a prototype Ada-based expert system tool called ART/Ada. This prototype was built to support research into the language and operational issues of expert systems in Ada. ART/Ada allows applications of a conventional expert system tool called ART-IM (Automated Reasoning Tool for Information Management) to be deployed in various Ada environments with efficient use of time and space. ART-IM, a C-based expert system tool, is used to generate Ada source code which is compiled and linked with an Ada-based inference engine to produce an Ada executable image. The future research directions call for improved support, for real-time embedded and distributed expert systems. ART/Ada will be used to implement several prototype expert systems for the Space Station Freedom Program testbeds.