ABSTRACT
This chapter describes several problem-solving tools and techniques that are used to analyze and design an expert system or, more generally, an information system with a rule base. During the analysis phase of an expert system or rule-based system development project, the system’s data, knowledge, and rules are determined. Forward chaining is a data-oriented approach that searches the solution space from an initial state to a final goal state. Facts in the database are matched with rules in the rule base, the appropriate rule(s) are executed, and the resulting new fact(s) are added to the original database. Reasoning-oriented problem-solving techniques focus on accumulating information until a solution is reached. Dependable data or knowledge and unreliable data or guesses are both used to support reasoning. The original problem is broken into smaller problems by applying heuristic principles to generate intermediate levels of abstraction.
