Engineering

Expert system integrators are similar to experts in other domains in that they 1) notice more things than novices; 2) have a rich store of well-organized domain knowledge; 3) do not necessarily have greater mental ability, cognitive capacity (e.g., memory) or reasoning ability; their skills appear to be context/job dependent; 4) exhibit greater automaticity in problem-solving. These experts appeared to see features or patterns in design problems that helped them to know how to begin solving them. Expert system integrators appear to be different from experts in other domains that have been studied in that 1) they work collaboratively and actively leverage the knowledge of vendors and their co-workers; 2) there is no single correct answer to a design problem. The main criterion for a satisfactory design solution is that both client and the system integrator are satisfied with the proposal. In the process of coming up with a design, the system integrator may persuade the client to accept a different kind of solution; 3) the final product for application engineers—a proposal—is a good-sized product consisting of drawings, and a line-by-line, station-by-station breakdown of equipment and costs. In contrast, the outputs of expert performance in other studies of expertise tend to be relatively narrow in scope—e.g., a medical diagnosis, a chess move, or a solution to a textbook physics problem.