Issues in Designing Rule-based Systems for Integrated Evaluation

The design of rule bases is plagued by various anomalies due to lack of structured development, and lack of a formal reference for the acquired knowledge. Often, the lack of a clear link connecting the functional requirements, the design, and the implementation levels of a rule-based system makes it difficult to analyze the rule base in terms of how well it represents the acquired knowledge. This also makes the existing verification and validation (V&V) tools to stand alone and to be isolated from development. Integration of V&V in a rule-based system design and development life cycle is being recommended by contemporary researchers for quality and reliability improvement. However, V&V processes for rule-based systems have been accepted to be non-trivial: methods that are general enough for comprehensive anomaly detection require impractical amounts of computation, and special methods (reduced computation for V&V) lack in their scope and applicability. In this work, we outline the use of a knowledge acquisition strategy called goal specification and its role as a link that connects the functional, design, and implementation stages of a system. We then identify various issues that affect integrating evaluation into development and how goal specification can facilitate handling these issues.