Selection of an Appropriate Domain for an Expert System

This article discusses t,he selection of the domain for a knowledge-based expert system for a corporate application The selection of the domain is a critical task in an expert system development At the st,art of a project looking into the development of an expert, syst,em, the knowledge engineering project team must investigate one or several possible expert system domains They must decide whether the selected application(s) are best suited to solution by present expert system technology, or if there might he a hettel way (or, possibly, no way) to attack the problems. If there arc several possibilities, the team must also rank the potential applications and select the best availahlc To evaluate the potential of possible application domains, it has proved very useful to have a set of desired at,trihutes for a good expert system domain. This art,iclc presents such a set of attrihut,es The at,trihute set was developed as part of a major expert system development project at GTE Lahorat.ories. It, was used recurrently (and modified and expanded continually) throughout an extensive application domain evaluation and selection process This article discusses the srlection of the domain for a knowledge-based expert system. In particular, it focuses on selecting an expert system domain for a corporate application. The choosing of the domain is a critical task in I would like to thank the management and members of the Knowledge Based Systems Department at GTE Laboratories fol their continuing suvuort in this work EsDeciallv, I would like to thank R,alph . I I . Worrest of the Department for his walk with me on the application evaluation and selection phase of our expert system dcvclopment project and for his suggestions tlnoughout the course of the work that led to this paper. Also, I’d like to thank Shri Goyal, Alan Gunderson, Alan Lemmon, Robert Reinke, and Roland Van der Meer of the Department, and Charles Rich of MIT for their suggestions on t,hr contents of this paper the development of an expert, system, and thus a significant amount of eflort should go into the selection process.