Computer-aided software engineering of expert systems

Abstract The problem of automatically reprogramming an expert system either to adjust for solving different types of computational problems or to improve run-time performance is addressed. A computer-aided software engineering (CASE) method using artificial intelligence techniques to instantiate a concrete program from a given abstract expert system architecture is proposed. Our method, called expert system reification, is suitable for use in a large range of problem-solving behaviors. Reification combines meta-level programming with partial evaluation of the program. Expert system reification extends the above blend with a knowledge-based translation module, thus obtaining an efficient and portable expert system version. We demonstrate the method by applying it to STAREX, an electronic circuit pack troubleshooting expert system developed in PROLOG to derive automatically the corresponding C code, which is currently installed at one of the AT&T manufacturing facilities.

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