Affiliations: Department of Chemical Engineering, Graduate School of Science and Engineering, Tokyo Institute of Technology 2-12-1 O-okayama, Meguro-ku, Tokyo 152-8550, Japan | Department of Informatics, University of Piraeus, 80 Karaoli & Dimiitriou St., Piraeus 185 34, Greece
Abstract: A chemical process design problem has several objective functions and systems approach is required for the problem solving. In a process design laboratory, it is desired for instructors to help students notice important cause-and-effect relations in the process design problem. However there are several important relations and no single correct answer in the design problem, so that is difficult for beginner instructors to give adequate advices to each student. The objects of this paper are to propose knowledge-based environments for the decision making of beginner instructors during the instruction and to discuss the results of an implemented system which makes a process that a student builds his/her knowledge structure visible. In the environments, Interpretive Structural Modeling(ISM) is applied to represent knowledge structures. The system is composed of two types of agents, called the “student agent” and “coach agent” and represents the process that the student agent builds the knowledge structure through their interactions. For accessibility, to create the agents, set up the agents, execute interaction between the agents, and monitor the process can be performed on the web.
Keywords: Web-based system, Interpretive Structural Modeling, process design laboratory, teaching assistant, multi-agent system
