The notion of design patterns, after architect Christopher Alexander, provides a powerful way to capture and describe reusable design knowledge for complex domains. In this position paper we present the idea of design patterns for molecular biology experiments, and discuss how they may be utilized to support experimental design reuse, reproducibility, and a platform for linking experiments. Des...

Expert systems have experienced tremendous growth and popularity since their commercial introduction in the early 1980’s. Today, expert systems are used in business, science, engineering, manufacturing, medical diagnosing, chemical, and many other fields. Mechanical engineers are the major users, expert systems, are finding rapid application in industry for such tasks as analysis of quality con...

This is a short discussion article about the comprehensive review paper by Bedford et al o n expert elicitation for reliable systems. Our article highlights especially the benefits of using Bayesian networks and also raises a number of issues that follow on from the review paper. The paper " Expert elicitation for reliable system design " by Bedford, Quigley and Wallis is timely and significant...

We describe an expert system that has been applied to the task of application design. Users supply the system with problem specifications, such as the required output data, and the system produces a graphic representation of the completed application in the form of a flow diagram. The application design task has forced us to consider two important issues in expert system architecture: constrain...

First of all, we would like to thank the discussants for the care and thoughtfulness that they have taken in preparing their comments. Koehler presents a helpful discussion, putting forward a number of different ideas that generalize the approach taken. A taxonomy for technical system elicitation would provide useful guidance for practitioners and serve to codify applicable assumptions during t...

The paper by Bedford, Quigley and Walls has reviewed the role of expert judgements in reliability assessment within the engineering design process. It differs from many statistically based papers that focus mainly on statistical models, in that it addresses issues related to the process, the concept and principles. The paper itself is comprehensive in coverage and offers general guidance for re...

Nowadays the field of centralized control is linked to major production processes or industrial applications, where the flow of information allows optimizing the total production process. In the area of small to medium enterprises (SMEs) (Wang & Kai-Yi, 2009), however it is still underdeveloped (Liao, 2009). Perhaps the reason is not the lack of capacity for the design or the cost of the techno...