IDC - Interim Data Collector: An expert system based upon a relational database management system

This thesis examines IDC--the Interim Data Collector, a program developed to store diverse technical data in the domain of avionics. The program generates a dialogue through menus and allows rapid data entry and retrieval based on operator supplied information about the modules. The program is written in CLIPPER (a superset of DBASE III+). I will show that IDC exhibits the characteristics associated with programs known as expert systems. These include data directed search, hierarchical dynamic pruning, an interactive user interface and a blackboard type inference engine. I also discuss the various sources of faults which contribute to reliability problems during program use and examine several techniques to increase the reliability of the expert system.