ISCS — an intelligent system configuration shell (abstract)

Introduction System configurat ion is the process by which a formalized description of a computer system and its interconnected components is produced based on an initial user account of the individual components. Configuration systems in the past, e.g. R1, have adopted a rule-based approach to handle this task. However, rules by themselves are too rigid (both in control and representation) to handle configurat ion problems in general. A recent trend, e.g. OCEAN, is to use hybrid representations. This paper dcscribes a novel system configuration shell (programming environment) which is specifically tailored to the development of configurat ion expert systems. This Intelligent System Configuration Shell (ISCS) is currently under development at Honeywell Information Systems Inc. The shell integrates multiple knowledge sources with appropriate knowledge representations (such as rules, frames, and demons) to solve computer system configurat ion tasks. The in ten t ion of the shell is to provide an environment to facil i tate knowledge engineers in the development of system configurators.