Mapping knowledge to rules for scheduling expert systems

摘要

Although the theoretical framework of expert systems has been well established, the process of developing a non-trivial expert system is still considered a difficult task. The main reason for this is that the nature of expert systems is knowledge-intensive. Also, it is usually difficult for domain experts to explain or communicate their expertise to the system professionals. Many methodologies have been proposed to overcome this domain knowledge representation problem. Most of them require the assistance of an expert system shell (tool). However, with a purpose of helping the system development in mind, most of them were not satisfactory. This research takes the experience of implementing a course scheduling expert system, and suggests two analysis methods to describe the characteristics of course scheduling knowledge. It is shown that these methods provide assistance on clarifying the complicated scheduling problem. Another favorable advantage of this method is its capability helping the transferring of domain knowledge to rules in the knowledge base.