5.2.2 A CASE-BASED REASONING APPROACH FOR THE ACCESS AND REUSE OF LESSONS LEARNED

This paper discusses the activities of an ongoing project to develop and demonstrate a prototype for capturing and reusing lessons learned at the Mission Operations and Data Systems Directorate (MO&DSD) of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA's) Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC). Primarily, systems and software engineering lessons learned are captured. Lessons learned describe difficulties and problems faced and ways to avoid them in the future. It is believed that lessons learned would be reused more often if others confronted with similar problems could locate them quickly and easily. Therefore, the case-based reasoning (CBR) approach, as an alternative to more conventional or other intelligent software methods, is being tried. A proof-of-concept prototype has been developed to evaluate the applicability of CBR to this problem. Because the system will be available to a diverse set of users, a process for incorporating lessons into the database has been defined.