An Approach for Designing Knowledge-Based Systems for High-Integrity Applications

The development of knowledge-based systems (KBSs) has been an area subject to much criticism due to the general lack of structured engineering methods. Although many design and development methods have been proposed and successfully realised, such as CommonKADS, there is still a continuing concern that the reliability of KBSs is difficult to evaluate. This is partly due to the limited incorporation of reliability modelling and validation and verification techniques at various stages of the development life cycle that provide such assurances. Given that current development trends of KBSs indicate a continuing integration with complex, high-integrity systems, it is important to develop KBSs with an engineering process that consolidates rigorous specification and evaluation techniques and methods that ensures the developed software meets the necessary certification standards. This paper presents a proposal of such an engineering process and briefly outlines and discusses the preliminaries of this.