A laboratory devoted to research on artificial intelligence (AI) applications in the design and development of decision support systems (DSS) will be established in the Department of Systems Engineering at the University of Virginia. This laboratory will be used to improve the quality and to broaden the scope of a range of ongoing DSS research activities, as well as to undertake new AI-based research in this area. Among the research activities which will share the proposed laboratory facility are projects concerning the development of knowledge-based or expert DSS for computer simulation optimization. The objectives of these projects include the development of a theory of simulation optimization and the implementation of this theory in at least two types of expert systems: those providing guidance in the selection of alternative optimization approaches and analysis techniques; and those utilizing different types of domain-specific expert knowledge to optimize particular simulations. The principal equipment to be acquired is a Symbolics 3670-1211 Computer System, supporting the Zetalisp development environment, the object-oriented programming systems FLAVORS, and the Fortran 77 and Pascal programming languages.
