Expert system tools used at Douglas Aircraft Company are presented to aid a subject matter expert in preparing a front-end analysis for instructional systems. Rules are given for selecting tasks for initial training and for refresher training. In addition, another automated tool used for the front-end analysis and selection of acceptable media is discussed. Decisions for selecting tasks for initial and refresher training and for identifying acceptable media are presented as major cost drivers of a program.

The expert system tools, tasks selected for training, and tasks selected for recurrent training were embedded in the copyrighted data base. After testing, they were conventionally programmed and now reside on an IBM mainframe and as personal computer tools. However, media selection is independent of the copyrighted data base because this tool has found additional uses in data bases of other systems with different requirements. These expert system tools are all rule-based and utilize various expert system shelis for their development.