Rule-based Reasoning In An Object-orientedManufacturing Environment
Homa Atabakhsh · WIT transactions on information and communication technologies · 1970
Rule-based reasoning has been integrated in a pure object-oriented environment taking advantage of the benefits offered by both paradigms by implementing a number of key expert system features in Smalltalk-80. A software toolkit has resulted called ExTool, which offers facilities for the user to create, modify and delete flexible production rules with no knowledge of the underlying programming language. In ExTool, decision-making is distributed rather than centralized in one large knowledge base. Inferencing is, therefore, opportunistic and is performed only on a subset of the relevant rules. The knowledge base is decomposed into a number of smaller knowledge bases representing specific decision-rules associated with only those objects involved in decisionmaking. Rules are activated through forward chaining inferencing, carried out by message passing. When the inference engine has insufficient information, it prompts the user for more input and continues with the new information. ExTool has explanation facilities for its reasoning, its production rules, and why it requires certain information. It has a friendly user interface which enables direct user-system interactions. ExTool has been successfully applied in an Enterprise Modelling application.