Genworks International, a d.b.a. of Knowledge Based Solutions, a Michigan corporation, has built knowledge-based engineering software since 1996. The engine is Gendl or Genworks GDL: a declarative language that captures engineering knowledge as executable code. Since 2002 it has run production applications in aerospace, automotive, and manufacturing. Today Genworks provides the whole workstation the engine runs in: Basalt, the deployment; Readymacs, the editing console; and Lisply-MCP, through which AI agents work in the live system.
The founder tells the same story in his own voice at davecooper.name.
Knowledge Based Solutions was incorporated in Michigan on 1 November 1996 by Dave Cooper, then a system analyst at Ford Motor Company building generative design applications with the ICAD System. Genworks began operating a year later, on 1 November 1997, the day after he left Ford. 1 November 2026 marks thirty years.
For its first five years Genworks was a consulting and training practice in the ICAD System: under contract at Ford and General Motors, and training engineers at Raytheon in Wichita and at Embraer in Brazil. The company offered no engine of its own in those years.
GDL began in 1997 as a private project, after a Common Lisp course at Franz Inc. in Berkeley in which a fellow student sketched a toy part-definition macro after ICAD's. The idea, that keyword arguments could carry a declarative definition through a macro, grew into DRL and then into GDL.
In 2002 ICAD changed hands and its largest customers left it. Genworks put GDL online as open source the same year, and a power generation company, ICAD's original customer, asked for a commercially supported edition. Genworks has made its living by its own software ever since.
The supported edition closed the source again, for nine years. Genworks GDL was deployed in steel, in defense and aerospace programs, and in education: the curriculum of the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering at Delft University of Technology, and companies of the YES!Delft incubator.
On 24 October 2011, at the height of the Delft engagement and in the week of the European Common Lisp Meeting in Amsterdam, Genworks released the kernel as open source for the second time, as the Gendl project, under the AGPL. Genworks GDL adds the AGPL exceptions, the industrial components, and the support that production work sometimes requires.
The most recent conversion was a window manufacturer's order-to-manufacture system, which had run on ICAD, unsupported since 2002, for the better part of twenty years. It was converted to Genworks GDL and validated shortly before that company went out of business; Genworks would welcome contact from anyone who ran it. Today Genworks provides the whole workstation the engine runs in: Basalt, the deployment; Readymacs, the editing console; and Lisply-MCP, through which AI agents work in the live system. All three are free and open source, maintained by Genworks.
Genworks is privately held, by its founder and CTO Dave Cooper, and has been continuously since 1996. It builds engineering knowledge systems meant to run for decades, on a language standard that has not changed since 1994.