NASA CLIPS Conference Paper 19910014730

N91-24043 CLIPS: A Tool for the Development and Delivery of Expert Systems G,'u'y Riley Software Technology Branch NASA Johnson Space Center Mail Stop PT4 Houston, TX 77058 ABSTRACT The 'C' Language Integrated Production System (CLIPS) is a forward chaining rule-based language developed by the Software Technology Branch at the Johnson Space Center. CLIPS provides a complete environment for the construction of rule-based expert systems. CLIPS was designed specifically to provide high portability, low cost, and easy integration with external systems. Other key features of CLIPS include a powerful rule syntax, an interactive development environment, high performance, extensibility, a verification/validation tool, extensive documentation, and source code availability. The current release of CLIPS, version 4.3, is being used by over 2,500 users throughout the public and private community including: all NASA sites and branches of the military, numerous federal bureaus, government contractors, 140 universities, and many companies. INTRODUCTION Expert system technology is a major subset of Artificial Intelligence and has been aggressively pursued by researchers since the early 1970's. In the last few years, both government and commercial application developers have given expert systems considerable attention as well. An entire industry has grown to support the development of expert system tools and applications, with a wide variety of both hardware and software products now available. The availability of expert system tools has greatly reduced the effort and cost involved in developing an expert system. Despite all this, expert systems have generally failed to make a major impact in application environments. This failure has stemmed from tool vendor's overemphasis on expert system development environments to the detriment of options for delivery of expert systems and training in expert system technology. Viable delivery options are necessary to field expert systems. Training options in expert system technology are necessary for the widest possible dissemination of this technology. The 'C' Language Integrated Production System (CLIPS) is a forward chaining rule-based production system developed by the Software Technology Branch at NASA/Johnson Space Center. Version 1.0 of CLIPS, developed in the spring of 1985 in a little over two months, accomplished two major goals. The first of these goals was to gain useful insight and knowledge about the construction of expert system tools and to lay the groundwork for future versions. The second of these goals was to address the delivery problems of integrating and embedding expert systems into convent…