The verification and validation of knowledge based systems
Robert Plant · 7th Computers in Aerospace Conference · 1989
Introduction The paper discusses the area of testing expert systems. It considers the three major traditional techniques available to knowledge engineers that address the problem:- traditional testing, formal specification and prototyping. The paper attempts firstly to demonstrate that it is impractical to employ traditional testing techniques to exhaustively test any non trivial expert system. Secondly, the attempt to use formal techniques is also shown to be of limited applicability and that only the static aspects of a system - the knowledge base and the control architecture can be specified, whereas the interaction of the knowledge and the output can not, as the system may be self modifying or the number of interactions to be specified is equal to the total number of tests required in exhaustive testing and therefore an infeasible task. The third technique prototyping is also considered to be impractical in that each situation can also not be individually tested.