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Fifth generation automatic control system for book publishing company.

by Volkov I.V.

 

Prolog [1] was invented by A. Colmerauer in the university of Marseille in 1971 as high level programming language specialized for automating reasoning and text processing. Later advantages of Prolog became the basis to choose it as main language in the famous japanese project of creation fifth generation computers [2]. Visual Prolog is commercial version of this language. It combines scientific basis with practical tools such as flexible external database system, graphical user interface, effective compiler, debugger and a set of ready tools that may be included into application. So it is interesting to try it in some commercial domain where intellectual text processing is required. Now i can report success of this experiment.

One of such domains is information business. Moscow commercial information agency Biznes-Karta (Business Map, www.biznes-karta.ru ) has the database containing information about human activities in various social spheres: industry, trade, transport, agriculture, government, science, medicine, etc. More than 180000 organizations in Russia and republics of former USSR for which the address, phone, name of chief manager, number of personnel, value of main funds and other important parameters are available. This information helps people to find each other in the conditions of market economy. They sell it in three forms: as a pure data in DBF format, in the form of electronic database and business reference books.

I came to this firm in the autumn of 1996 and have got a task to modify programs for preparation of these books. In that time they had several utilities written in C language under DOS and for each group of books one separate program was used. I decided to rewrite this from scratch using my PDC Prolog 3.3 and to create one program for preparation of all books. So complicated report generator Publish appeared. It transforms database into the text file that compose main part of the book using such operations as data coding, sorting, filtration, text transformation and formatting. Also Publish generates supplementary parts of the book - indexes and table of contents. Later i ported this program under Windows in Visual Prolog 5.1 and now (according to advertisement) Agency of Business Information issues annually 205 different books with total number of 800000.

But then they encountered difficulties with organizing of such large scale production and asked me to write some kind of automatic management tool. Recently i have finished it. Automatic control system works on two-stage principle: analysis and synthesis. The source data for this program are monthly selling for each book and the amount at the warehouse. For manipulations with these data the Tableedit tool was chosen. There are three different tables: selling, parameters that are different for each book and parameters, equal for each book. User can input data manually or import from book-keeping program. Off course user can edit data in the table. On the stage of analysis the program calculates average selling rate and predicts the date when the stock will be empty. Also more complicated methods of regression analysis may be used for the forecast. New calculated data are displayed in the same table along with the source data.

The graphical representation is available. On the stage of synthesis automatic control system must calculate the number of books that is necessary to print and the date for printing-office. There are several methods how to do it. The program allows for maximal number of books that can be printed per month and the importance of different volumes. The hard copy of calculated data is available in different formats for different departments of the company.

Literature.

1. Colmerauer A. Metamorphosis grammars, In: Natural Language

communication with

Computers (L. Bolc, ed.), pp. 139-169, Lecture Notes in Computer

Science, vol. 63, Springer-

Verlag, Berlin, 1978.

2. Simons G.L. Towards fifth-generation computers. NCC Publications,

1983.

3. Sterling L., Shapiro E.The art of Prolog. MIT Press Cambridge,

Massachusetts, 1986.

1999.12.06. Moscow, Russia.