Automating Scientific and Engineering Computing

Contents

This paper describes research on automating scientific and engineering computing by combining domain knowledge, mathematical theory, artificial intelligence techniques, and numerical software. We present two case studies: kinematic analysis of mechanisms and phase space analysis of dynamical systems. The case studies illustrate our general strategy of identifying an important task domain, formalizing the domain knowledge and analysis tools of experts, and incorporating the formalization into a useful problem solver. The problem solvers could not work without a robust, high-level interface to conventional numerical software. We describe an initial interface that manages a root finder, a continuation package, an ordinary differential equation integrator, and a Lyapunov exponent calculator.