CONFIGURATION EXPERT SYSTEMS: A CASE STUDY AND TUTORIAL

This contribution discusses the architecture of expert systems for configuration tasks in technical domains with the objective to develop application-specific tools for expert system development. In the first part of the paper four configuration systems (XCON, SICONFEX, MMC-Kon and ALL-RISE) are analyzed with regard to their architectural features and experiences gained during the development. From these examples and similar evidence in several other systems one can conclude that a knowledge-based architecture much different from the conventional rule-based architecture is adequate for configuration systems. The main components of the configuration system architecture are described in the second part. The particular design presented in this paper is based on research in project TEX-K.

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